DAVID MALLET (VIDEO DIRECTOR): I first met David when I was producing and directing The Kenny Everett Show, and we had him on the show performing a rehash of “Space Oddity.” This must have been January 1980. He liked what I did for him and asked if I would make some videos. He was completely un-strange, highly intelligent…I think I would actually say that the biggest plus point was that he just wanted to collaborate. It started off as, I guess you could say, mutual suspicion. Rock and rollers aren’t mad on television people, and television people are normally slightly in awe of, or, expecting the worst from, someone with his reputation. But everything I found was completely the opposite to what I would have expected. I probably learnt from him a lot of stagecraft and showmanship tricks, particularly stagecraft because he’d obviously learned from people like Lindsay Kemp. If he said, “Blah, blah, blah” and I said, “Oh bollocks, that won’t work,” he’d say, “Oh, all right then” and we’d come up with something else. We talked about old television a lot, ridiculous things, obscure British nostalgia. We had a little obsession with an English harp player called Shirley Abicair who was always on TV in the ’50s. God knows what she was, just a ridiculous name that we both remembered from our childhood. Stupid things like that. In those days, video was regarded as the top form as opposed to a bit of wallpaper, which it is now, so you did your very best to make a film based on the record that was either to a lesser or greater extent illustrative of the song. On “Ashes to Ashes,” David said he wanted to be a clown on a beach with a bonfire and wanted to include all the New Romantics, all these characters from the Blitz club. I said great, but I can improve on that, because I’d recently done something where I found a process which made the sky turn black and it made the whole thing look like some hallucinogenic dream. Great, says David, we’ll do that. The norm for a video in those days was a day, but “Ashes to Ashes” broke the record at three. There was a beach, there was a studio, there was a building site, you know, on and on. It was epic.
The filming was interrupted at one point by an old man walking his dog, looking for driftwood. Mallet asked him if he wouldn’t mind moving, and pointed out Bowie sitting outside the catering van. “Do you know who this is?” he asked. Sharp as a tack, the old man responded with, “Of course I do. It’s some cunt in a clown suit.” Sometime later, Bowie remembered, “That was a huge moment for me. It put me back in my place and made me realize, ‘Yes, I’m just a cunt in a clown suit.’ ”
IAIN R. WEBB: In 1980, when Bowie planned to make a video to accompany “Ashes to Ashes,” he visited the Blitz nightclub to handpick his costars, among them Steve Strange wearing designer Judith Frankland’s black wedding dress. Frankland walked alongside Strange, behind Bowie, who was now dressed as a clown by longtime collaborator Natasha Korniloff [who had worked with Lindsay Kemp]. The Blitz’s New Romantic crowd had started life at a Bowie night at Billy’s nightclub in Soho in 1978. It was Bowie’s original flamboyance that caught the imagination of the hardcore style snobs that formed the New Romantic scene, and what secured Bowie’s credentials as a style icon was his elitist standpoint.
STEVE STRANGE (CLUB RUNNER): I was on the Blitz door and as usual we were up to full capacity when I saw a black stretch limo go round the corner three times. At the time we had already been given two warnings from the council over fire regulations and the number of people we had in the club. In fact the week before I had to turn Mick Jagger away because we were up to capacity. He was with Sabrina Guinness and Jagger said to me, “Don’t you know who I am?” I said of course I do, please don’t make this any harder than it is. Luckily I knew Sabrina and she calmed him down. So this time the limo pulls up and this really stroppy woman called Coco informed me, “I’ve got somebody very important in the back of that black limousine.” Because she was so stroppy I gave her quite an arrogant answer. But when she said it was David Bowie I went into meltdown. I thought, Oh my God, what do I do now? If the kids queuing to get in the club even know he’s in that limo outside, he’ll be mobbed, so I went into overdrive thinking, How the hell are we going to get him into the building without causing too much of a fracas? I called security and we opened up the back level of the club, which was the fire exit, and got him upstairs and put him into what we thought was a quiet area, away from prying eyes. However, word spread from the queue and we had to get security downstairs to stop people coming upstairs. Everybody wanted to be near him. It got to a point where Coco came up to me and said, “David wants you on his table.” I wasn’t being arrogant but I said excuse me I have my job to do. I take my job very seriously. This is not a goldfish bowl; the kids that are in this club are here because they feel at home. My shift doesn’t finish until one thirty a.m. When I finally went up to him he said to me, “I’ve been watching you and love what you’ve been doing and the sound that you’re creating musically and I’d like you to be in my next video.” He asked me to style and choose the extras for the video, which was “Ashes to Ashes.” So four of us were told to meet outside the Hilton Hotel in London at six thirty in the morning and we were all thinking we’re going somewhere fabulous, and then we’re told we’re going to Southend! They’d closed off the whole beach, but it was freezing. He came back to some of my other clubs, like the Camden Palace and the Café de Paris; in those days you had each other’s home phone numbers, there was no changing your mobile phone like there is now. If you didn’t move around too much you could stay in touch and we did.
ANGUS MACKINNON (JOURNALIST): So this was August 1980, and the NME had sent me to Chicago to see him in The Elephant Man, before it went to Broadway, and to interview him about Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). The show was excellent. A lot of people who saw it in both Chicago and New York said the Chicago cast, a rep cast, was actually a lot better. Relations with him and RCA were pretty difficult by then, and there was this woman in L.A. called Barbara Dewitt who would ring you up and shout down the phone, “You’ve only got half an hour!” I don’t think he’d done an interview for some time, because I remember at the end he said something along the lines of, “I have to admit I wasn’t looking forward to this at all, but it has actually gone pleasantly well.”
One of the reasons I left Oxford without finishing my degree was because I’d seen the Ziggy Stardust tour, and wanted to find a way to write about it. I left to work in a record shop, and eighteen months later was working for Sounds. So I was a big fan. Bowie was by far the most fascinating person I met in the six or seven years of writing about such things. He had just divorced Angie and in our interview he was talking about everyday happiness, and he said that as far as someone like himself could ever be happy, “I am, and it’s a real joy having my son.” His self-analysis was lacerating. He talked a lot about his sense of self, and one of the things that came across, and this was not false modesty, was his constant anxiety that what he was doing wasn’t quite interesting enough. Here was a person who seriously pushed himself, and constantly reevaluated his contribution, and he found himself lacking. Blessing and curse.
Another thing that struck me was how completely unto himself he was. Occasionally the persona would break and there would be this moment of real warmth, and he’d laugh in a particular way, or he’d be very jocular about something. You’d think, What percentage of this is the real life? But he gave you what you wanted. If you were in shades and tight black leather trousers he would give you the rock and roll interview, and if you were me, wearing drainpipe cords and a tweed jacket and the air of the rock pseudointellectual about you, he would give you that. He’d always been interested in Buddhism, and he said he often had a fantasy of retiring to a monastery on a misty mountain in Kyoto or somewhere, and he’d have his opium and eventually when he died he’d just disappear in a cloud of bliss. Even at the time I felt he really meant it. Fascinated though he was by the struggles of his own creativity, the appeal of this [disappearing] was huge. It must have been exhausting to be David Bowie. You could tell that it weighed heavily on him. The morning after our first interview, [photographer] Anton Corbijn and I met him again in this little bar a couple of blocks away [from the theater]. Coco and Anton then went off to scout for locations, and when Bowie and I emerged blinking into the sunlight, he jaywalked, looking the wrong way, as a large vehicle approached him, a truck I think, so I grabbed him and pulled him back onto the sidewalk. So you could say I saved his life!
JACK HOFSISS (DIRECTOR): I certainly saw David in The Man Who Fell to Earth, I mean, it was a major film at the time, and it was a major revelation that a rock star could create such a full character and be contained within the structure of a film. I didn’t ever expect that our paths were going to intersect at any point, but a number of years later I was directing The Elephant Man on Broadway, and the lead actor was going off to tour with a national company that traveled around the United States. So we were looking for another actor to replace him. The play was very close to my heart and normally a director at that point might be just personally involved where he would approve of the actor [and] then stage managers would take the new actor and teach him the part. But as fate would have it I was at a club called Ross on West Sixty-Seventh Street, owned by a friend of mine. And during the course of that evening they introduced me to David, who happened to be there that night. He had just seen The Elephant Man and said he had liked it very much. And so that was that. In The Man Who Fell to Earth I saw primarily an ability to play a character who exists in isolation, and that was similar to the dilemma of the Elephant Man. The real John Merrick was locked up inside his grotesquery. So many people from rock and roll get by on playing a sort of persona but [here] was a real actor creating a [real] character. We all go through our lives with some sort of a limp, and we hide our limps very actively, so in a way the human being that you play who has a physiological limp is more human than others. It’s the kind of stuff that actors love to do.
David did not need to be directed. I didn’t really say that much about it, because it was unnecessary and the actor was right on the money. He kind of shamed the other actors of the company, who weren’t nearly as disciplined as him quite frankly. There was a carefulness about David rehearsing the part. His performance was much more streetwise [than Philip Anglim’s performance]. You really got the feeling that this man had been beaten around. And been through it. And therefore he was not gonna let people in until he knew them and was sure of their intentions. The central metaphor of the play was imagination, and the audience had to do the thinking. It was in part a mime role. There was a quality in the way he pitched his voice that made me [imagine] a little child, a little guy in there that had been knocked around the streets. I didn’t know precisely if he came from a middle-class background or higher-class background, but he did know about that world.
David brought a level of truthful reality to the play. He knew these places that the play was set. He knew because it was his home. He knew London in a way that we who don’t live there couldn’t possibly. He felt like he had walked the streets and been looked at strangely. And he had synonymous relationships to the Elephant Man—I’m sure in his early days as a musician and certainly in his early days in the guises that he assumed in that part of his life. And if he took that on tour and walked the streets he would get looked at. That seemed particularly easy for David to access. You can tell when actors know something that’s analogous to what the character’s experiencing. And that’s golden.
One time on a Wednesday afternoon we had a couple of David’s fans sitting way down in the front, and there was this young guy who had a black leather jacket filled with little Christmas lights. And they were on. The jacket was all lit up. I remember I turned to the little usherette with the white bib and the flashlight and I said, “Excuse me, could you go down to Row B and ask that man to turn off his coat?” We gave new meaning to the word blue-haired matinee.
GIORGIO MORODER (PRODUCER): [In 1981] I was working on the movie Cat People and I was talking to the director Paul Schrader, and I said, “Who shall we take for the single? Who represents that weirdness of the movie?” And we immediately said David Bowie. So I wrote the song and I sent it to him. He loved it, he wrote the lyrics, we went to Montreux in Switzerland, where he lived at that time; we went to the studio owned by Queen, and we recorded it in less than an hour. He sang it twice, and it was done. It was absolutely professional. Obviously he knew the song because he wrote the lyrics. It was one of my easiest, fastest and greatest recordings ever.
TONY SCOTT (DIRECTOR): I’d been given Flashdance and it really was, “Fuck, what am I going to do with this?” Adrian Lyne had got The Hunger and was like, “What the fuck am I going to do with this?!” So we swapped scripts. A week after, he said, “My daughter’s been watching this thing called MTV.” He said, “I’m going to do an MTV movie of this piece of shit….” [For The Hunger] I stole from Nic Roeg, for performance and for style, and I stole from Helmut Newton’s erotica. His pictures tell a story. They’re always erotic and sexy and perverse and strange and fucked-up. I showed the girls [Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve] what I wanted. And they were a bit, erm, long faces. So I did a lot of body doubles. A lot of the sex in there is around the mouths and the faces. When you get down below it gets porno if you’re not careful. I used a lot of smoke and so on. That was really the influence of my commercials. A lot of smoke, backlight, the occasional billowing curtain. Well, a lot of billowing curtain. It got slammed for being esoteric and artsy. It got fucking killed. It took me three more years to get another movie after it.
DAVID BAILEY: I shot David Bowie a lot over the years, and did some great pictures of him with Catherine Deneuve for their film The Hunger, in 1982, although he was always very reserved, and had a definite view of how he wanted to be portrayed. Which made it very difficult to take a picture of him if you were trying to be creative. In the early days it was easier to take a celebrity’s photograph, because they didn’t really know what to expect, but now they all know what they’re going to get. The thing I hate is when someone phones and says, “I’ve got this great idea.” I always say, “I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you come to the studio and I’ll shoot you against a nice white background.” Bowie always had very definite ideas about how he wanted to be photographed, which meant he should have been shot by someone else, not me. Actors are often hard to photograph because they never want to reveal who they are, and you don’t know if you’re going to get a character from a Chekhov play or a Polanski film. And in his heyday Bowie was a lot like an actor, always acting like someone else. They’re always trying to put one over on you, because they want you to take a snapshot of their current version of themselves. It depends what mood they’re in. It’s always better to take a photograph of an actor when they’re young, because as they get older they learn to disguise themselves. Bowie certainly knew how to disguise himself. But the difference between me and lots of portrait photographers is that I won’t make people look like idiots. Photographing odd-looking people is a gift, because you’ve got such a lot to work from. But I don’t like it when editors call me and ask me to make someone look aggressive, or sad, or powerful, or arrogant, or timid. That’s unfair. It also becomes journalistic, and I’m not interested in journalism on that level. Why should you photograph powerful or rich people and make them look venal or corrupt? I photographed a series of powerful people once and I made them all smile, because that’s not what you expect from a portrait of a powerful person. With Bowie I never knew what to do as he always had a preconceived idea of what he wanted to look like, which was of no interest to me.
JEREMY THOMAS (FILM PRODUCER): I was at the Cannes Film Festival in 1978 and at the awards ceremony I found myself sitting next to the director of Empire of Passion, Nagisa Oshima, who had won the Best Director award. He was one of my heroes, having directed classics such as Death by Hanging, The Ceremony, and In the Realm of the Senses. I adored his films. He was in a kimono, and I was just a young lad. We drank a lot of wine, exchanged business cards, and then a few years later a Japanese colleague came and said that Oshima wanted to know if I might be interested in making a film with him. It was based on the Laurens van der Post book The Seed and the Sower, about his experiences as a Japanese prisoner of war during World War Two. The screenplay was 250 pages long, impossible to make, but I said I was coming to Tokyo for the opening of Bad Timing, and could I bring [the screenwriter] Paul Mayersberg with me. He had written The Man Who Fell to Earth and at the time was working with me on Eureka. And so off we went, rewrote the script with Oshima, and then set about making Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, a genuine co-production. Half the money was coming from Japan, and I said I’d find the rest. Looking back now I would say it’s my perfect idea of a film, as it brought everything I love about cinema and culture together.
When we met Oshima he said that he saw Robert Redford in the role that David eventually played, so we attempted to get him, as it needed to be someone with blond hair and blue eyes, someone who could be so enchanting to a Japanese man. So then he started talking about “Bowie-san.” Through mutual friends I set up a meeting in Roland Gardens, near Blakes Hotel, one evening. Bowie was so smart, he knew exactly who Oshima was. He was cultivated. Liked Japanese culture a lot. We bonded over a love for William Burroughs, as at that time I wanted to make a movie of Naked Lunch. He loved Burroughs, loved J. G. Ballard, loved Brion Gysin, all the things I liked at the time. And he said he wanted to do it, immediately actually. From then on he was 100 percent committed, as committed as you’d want anyone to be on a project like this. He had a great spirit, and an acceptance of anything that might happen.
He had a real desire to be free on a desert island. We filmed it on Rarotonga—because of a New Zealand tax deal—where there were only a few hundred people, so David was free to roam around, ride his bicycle. There was no screen test, as Bowie had everything special that you needed—he was a very unique figure. Some of those images are still very powerful, especially the shot where he is buried in the sand, where the moth lands on his head, completely by chance. This was in the days before digital enhancement. David was completely involved in the film, and he had no issues with any hardships. He trusted his director, which is what you want from an actor. He enjoyed himself, and used it as a punctuation mark between what else he was doing. He used a lot of the people on the film when he was making some pop promos for Let’s Dance.
The reason we cast him was a combination of his star power and his genuine ability to play the role. I’ve worked with lots of actors who are non-actors, but they’re performers. And that was Bowie, the perfect performer. On that level he actually surpassed what I believed he could do with the film, and his strength and range were superb. The mime was all his idea, the shaving scene was all his idea. This was a film made by a Japanese master, and having David Bowie star in it helped give it context. David always wanted to be in the avant-garde, he wanted to be the first. He was a “before the others” kind of guy. He wasn’t doing this film for the money. A rock star’s life usually precludes them from significantly doing anything else, but not David. His river of life was the right one, he was a force for good. We showed the film on the Saturday night at Cannes, and this was the night the French medical students decided to riot, throwing condoms filled with blood everywhere. There was blood and tear gas all over the place.
PAUL MAYERSBERG: On Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence David was cast before I started writing, and it’s the only time I had written something for an actor, and it was written specifically with him in mind. Oshima’s original script was very long and not very good, so I came in to rewrite it. I met David in New York to talk about it, and although we were not close friends, we always got on very well. He was doing The Elephant Man just before. We talked about remorse, as that was the theme that we settled on, for the character, for Jack Celliers. I knew what he could do and what he couldn’t do, so I made sure there were no long speeches. I made it as mimey as I could, so there’s a lot of action, a lot of things for him to do. It was tailored for him. He looks beautiful in the film, like an angel.
The film was full of people who had never acted before. As far as I know, Ryuichi Sakamoto had never acted before, and he was quite a big star in the film. And Takeshi Kitano was like the Benny Hill of Japan. When I eventually saw the film, Bowie’s performance was more spectral than I had written it, more ghostly. He had a strange quality in the film. Of course there are only men in the film, and I told Oshima I was worried about this. I was worried people might think it was a gay film. He said, “Oh no, don’t be ridiculous.” He denied this, and said that in war men have close relationships, not necessarily gay relationships. But I persisted, and wrote a few lines where the Japanese sergeant calls the English public schoolboys “faggots.” I thought that would get rid of the idea, but come the opening in Cannes, I looked at the papers the morning after, and lo and behold, Liberation called it a gay film. At the press conference, some lady said it was the first film she could remember seeing which had an all-male cast, which in no way gave her a sense of aggression towards women. Bowie didn’t strike me as being particularly gay; I think he just exaggerated all of that for the press. Essentially I think David did films as a sort of relaxation, where he didn’t have to take charge of anything. He didn’t have to be responsible. At all. He could put his life in the hands of the director, and I think he liked that. I don’t remember him ever having an argument. Actually at the screening in Cannes, I asked him if he would ever be interested in doing a sequel to The Man Who Fell to Earth, which was an idea I had that would only have worked with Bowie. He said, “Oh, absolutely. Anytime I feel I need a nervous breakdown, I’ll work with Nic Roeg.” But I never saw that. Maybe he was joking.
SEAN DOYLE (BLOGGER): At some point in the early ’80s, Bowie decided that he wanted to make one last, violent push for the global megastardom he’d been batting at since his first hit, and he set himself to the task with steadfast determination. He left his longtime label RCA, on the grounds that they’d failed to properly market his supremely unmarketable late ’70s LPs. He dumped most of his regular collaborators and put together an expansive new team. He rudely brushed off producer Tony Visconti and hired Chic’s Nile Rodgers. The result of all this was Let’s Dance, the biggest commercial success of his career and the first album to win him a significant American audience. Longtime fans saw this as a kind of betrayal, and Bowie didn’t help matters by adopting a brightly conservative new Reagan-era look and calling his former admissions of bisexuality “the biggest mistake I ever made.”
NILE RODGERS (PRODUCER): I was turned on to David Bowie in a very unique situation. This was before Chic, and Bernard [Edwards] and I were in a band called New York City, and we were playing down in Miami Beach, and I met this girl at a nightclub and she invited me to spend the night with her on the beach. She was a photographer and she wanted to get naked under the stars. She brought her favorite music with her and it was Ziggy Stardust, and it was amazing. I’d never heard songs like that, never heard music like that before in my life, and I remember singing “Suffragette City” naked on Miami Beach. At the time I actually thought he was called Ziggy Stardust. That was a seriously great introduction to David Bowie, being naked on a beach listening to Ziggy Stardust for the first time. From that moment on I started devouring all of David’s records, and I loved them. He had such amazing scope.
I first met David in an after-hours club called the Continental, in New York. I arrived at around five or six in the morning with a very drunk Billy Idol, and we both saw him at the same time. Billy said, “Fucking hell it’s David Fucking Booooowie!” We were both pretty drunk. I went over to speak to him—I think Billy was starting to throw up at this point—and just started talking to him. All of my friends had been in the Young Americans band—Luther Vandross, Carlos Alomar, Dennis Davies. We all went to school together. So I thought we already had a connection. And we talked all night about music. He had a surprising amount of knowledge about R&B. That’s why we got on so well, as he was shocked by what I knew, and I was shocked by what he knew. David was 180 degrees away from what I expected him to be like. I imagined him to be ultra-flamboyant, and more like the characters that he was playing. But in fact I was flamboyant compared to David. It was the ’80s, so we all had foxtails hanging off our jackets, and David was sitting there dressed in a suit. No one dressed like that in those kinds of clubs. No one wore a suit! He was almost unrecognizable, sitting by himself, sipping orange juice, in one of the hottest clubs in New York.
Anyway, he said he was interested in me producing his next record, and we went from there. We did some demos in Switzerland, but to me the demos just felt like me auditioning, even though he had already chosen me. I guess he was just thinking, Let’s see what this guy’s going to do….
“Let’s Dance” was a folk song when I first heard it. David was playing it on a twelve-string guitar, which I found out he’d had for many years. He walked into my bedroom and started playing this strummy little song. Normally if it were folky and we hadn’t had the kind of discussions as to what the album was going to be like, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me, but he had painted such a clear picture for me as to what he wanted, not necessarily what the songs should sound like, but the effect they should have on people. That’s what was cool. He showed me a picture of Little Richard wearing a red suit getting into a red Cadillac. And he said, “Nile darling, I want the album to sound like this.” I saw the picture and I thought to myself, I get it. This picture looked like it could be from the future, but I knew it was from the past. I realized as soon as I saw the photo that he wanted a record that was evergreen, that would sound like a band could come out with it now and it still sound contemporary. David wanted hits.
Now, I’m not sure that I felt any pressure because of this, but I felt pressure because I was running away from hits. I was trying to be thought of as a more credible, serious record producer, and I wanted David to sort of propel me to the place where people could see that I could do jazz or classical or whatever. And that wasn’t necessarily hit-orientated material. I wanted to do cerebral material, and if you luck out and get a hit, then it’s cool. I suppose “Let’s Dance” is sort of like that. If you listen to the full recording, the solo, the opening of the record with the pocket trumpet, and all that kind of thing, it was a more cerebral type of commercial record. But I couldn’t have pulled that off with anyone else, and it was because it was Bowie that we could do a song like “Let’s Dance,” and it could be thought of as commercial. I knew the record was special but I had no idea it was going to be big. When I first worked on the arrangement with the band, we played it for David and he said, “Wow! Is this my song?” I remember the look on Stevie Ray Vaughan’s face when he came up to play the solo, and he just heard the track and—again—he went, “Wow, what is this?” I could look at him and tell that he was feeling what I was feeling. I had never heard of Stevie Ray Vaughan at the time, and that was all David. He knew so much, had such varied interests, he was like the Picasso of rock and roll.
This was new territory, for all of us, for me, for David, for Stevie and for all the musicians on the record. There’s only been a couple of times in my life when I knew the records I was making were going to be hits. “Le Freak” I knew right away, and I couldn’t believe that the record company couldn’t hear it. When we played it for them they hated it. We cleared out the conference room. They all went outside to figure out how to tell us it sucked. And that was the biggest-selling single in Atlantic’s history, for thirty-three years until Flo Rida topped us a couple of years ago. We capped it, too, at 7 million. If we had let it go we don’t know what it would have sold. I also knew “We Are Family” was going to be a hit. I knew that song was a monster. Not “Let’s Dance.”
NICK KENT: Let’s Dance is his weakest record, it’s his “I’ve got nothing to say and I’m saying it” record. “Put on your red shoes and dance the blues.” He’s saying completely nothing. I will be completely shallow and I will sell more records than ever. Just as a statement to you that I can jump from cultdom into the mainstream. And that is why Bowie was unique, because he could do that. Elvis Presley couldn’t do that. By 1975, Bowie had realized what being Elvis was really like, and he knew he was better than that. I write my own songs. I don’t need some big cigar-chomping manager running my life, I don’t need that, I’m better than that. Bowie was a class apart.
NILE RODGERS: Let’s Dance is the easiest record I’ve ever made in my life. Seventeen days from start to finish. Mixed and delivered. When we finished the last track we never touched the record again. We were on a wavelength that was just spectacular, and we just clicked. “That is beautiful, Nile,” David used to say, always so proper. He actually spent a lot of time sitting in the lounge watching TV and then he’d just come in and go “Wow!” and then he’d go back to the TV. And I’m actually thinking, “This is the highest form of respect that anyone has ever given to me.” He didn’t have a record deal at the time, and he paid for that record himself. So we had no one to answer to. I’m not sure that he normally thought like that anyway, but it just felt like me and David against the world.
I was just coming off of the whole “Disco Sucks” thing, so it wasn’t like everybody in the world was trying to get me. In 1979, when the whole Disco Sucks thing had kicked in, even though I had had tons of hit records, and even though I had produced Diana Ross’s biggest album—“I’m Coming Out,” “Upside Down,” and all that stuff—that was sort of the last hurrah for Chic. It was really toxic, and although I’d made all these records, there was a sense that we were a kind of novelty. I didn’t have a hit after Diana Ross, not until Let’s Dance, and even though it was only two years, to me it felt like an eternity. So we were both in a place where we were rescuing each other. It’s like we were in a lifeboat together. He wasn’t in such great spirits until he heard the musicians playing it, and that changed everything. He didn’t know anyone on that record apart from Stevie, and everyone else was someone I knew. They were people who I could depend on, who I knew would bring a sort of funky element to avant-garde rock. I wanted to treat it like a jazz record, calling up a bunch of guys and having them come in and play. I was steering everything, and David really let me run with the ball. And we sold 11 million albums, the biggest hit of his career. Up until that moment he had been selling 3 million, maybe 4, but Let’s Dance was a monster. It was scorchingly hot.
I was quite upset when the record came out because David hardly mentioned me. I think he was shocked by the success of Let’s Dance, but it was such a departure from his normal style of music that I’m sure the journalists kept saying, “Nile Rodgers,” and that probably pissed him off and made him feel uncomfortable. I’m guessing. He never told me that but I could just tell because the lack of credit was serious. When he was on the cover of Time magazine I’m not even sure I’m mentioned in the article. That really sort of hurt. And I was vocal about it. And because of that, or maybe because he felt it was the right time, we kissed and made up. I was getting an award one night, and he gave me the award, and when he delivered his speech he said, “I am honored to give this award to Nile Rodgers, the only man who could make me start a song with a chorus.”
Regardless of when you entered Bowie’s world—or, perhaps more accurately, regardless of when you allowed him to enters yours—emotionally his work often had a way of moving backwards and forwards at the same time, not in the by-now old-fashioned retro-future sense first introduced by Roxy Music in 1971 as part of the necrophiliac economy, but in the sense that a lot of his best music manages to be both timeless and refreshing at the same time; I defy anyone to listen to “Let’s Dance” and not experience both a wave of gilt-edged nostalgia, but also a feeling of slightly disturbing exhilaration, as though something rather wonderful is just about to happen. I remember just before “Let’s Dance” was due to be released, in the spring of 1983, reading somewhere—in the NME probably, when a rumor printed there was still assumed to have come from someone who knew what they were talking about—that Bowie was about to release a Philadelphia-inspired album, a modern, actually thoroughly postmodern take on his Young Americans volte-face. Me and my cronies sat around, slack-jawed, before proclaiming that Bowie had managed to fish out the Zeitgeist from the back of the sofa yet again; at the time we were all playing Gamble and Huff in the clubs we were notionally the custodians of, and we conceitedly congratulated ourselves on being as smart as Bowie was.
But of course we were wrong. Bowie was a lot smarter than we were ever going to be. When we eventually heard “Let’s Dance,” predictably (or not) it was like nothing we’d ever heard before. It wasn’t particularly novel, and nor was it especially difficult; far from it. The record was actually tremendously bold, almost unbelievably catchy, and borderline expedient. And yet it filled the room as no room had been filled before.
TONY MCGEE (PHOTOGRAPHER): In 1983 I was invited to a cocktail party in Chelsea given by Michael White, the impresario. He was the toast of London at the time, friends with Jack Nicholson, David Bailey, Nona Summers, and just about everyone else that ran around. And I had caught the attention of Michael and he thought it would be nice if I came over and had a few drinks and sat in the room and got to know a few people. At one point Jerry Hall came over and she said she wanted to introduce me to Coco Schwab. And I asked if she had anything to do with the pharmaceutical company in America, because I’d seen it all over L.A. and I thought it must be. And she said it is, she’s the daughter. Then Coco came over and said that David was about to arrive, and I said, “David Bowie? You’re not serious?” And within a minute he bounced into the room in a very good mood, feeling very much on top of his game, talking all about Serious Moonlight, all about Let’s Dance, all about the anticipation of that. We sat and we chatted. What did we have in common? Well, I grew up next to the Tate Gallery in Victoria, and I spent most of my time there. I’d wander around. I loved the echoey halls and the cold floors and I loved the paintings most of all. I mentioned this to David and he said he would go there at least once a week. And I jokingly said, “I bet we walked past each other.” We’d play this game in the gallery, running around, playing catch. This was 1963. And David said that he probably saw us, as he had played the same game. We both decided definitely we were already mates. Coco called me a few days later and said that David felt very comfortable with me and that something’s going to happen. “I think you could do some interesting things,” she said. She kept saying, “David is very comfortable with you.” So we started shooting together. The first session we shot in my studio in Farringdon Road. He came in with Coco and he arrived with sacks of clothes—houndstooth check suits, Prince of Wales suits. I told him I was fascinated with his eyes, and he said his eyes were like my camera—I was using a Rolleiflex, which has a twin lens. He said one is for seeing, one is for taking. He said one is observing, one is recording. That was a lovely afternoon.
And then we were off. We suddenly became close. We were embarrassingly close. He was intense. An intense friendship for six weeks and then you wouldn’t see him for six years. I really enjoyed the intensity I have to say. Whether or not it’s necessary to sustain that, I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s important. What’s really great is you have these periods in your life where, I don’t know, you go on holiday somewhere and you meet a group of people and they feel very cool to be with when you’re on the beach with them. And then there are tears at the end of August when you take the train home. And that’s what it felt like. It was an intense August relationship.
JOHN MITCHINSON (HEAD OF RESEARCH FOR THE BRITISH TELEVISION PANEL GAME QI AND VICE PRESIDENT OF THE HAY FESTIVAL): I was working as the head barman in Legends in the West End in the mid-’80s, which at the time was a really hot club. One night, it had not been particularly busy, David Bowie walked in. He came into the bar and said, “Can I have a packet of Marlboro, please.” He was blond, buff, in a suit. And I said, “Yeah…and thank you.” He looked slightly embarrassed and I said, “I guess people say that to you all the time, but thank you, for everything…” And he said, “Thank you too. For the cigarettes.”
HARVEY GOLDSMITH: Bowie was always an irregular performer, and he didn’t perform to order. He had an internal clock, and he didn’t do things until the alarm went off on his internal clock. But it wasn’t like a normal clock; it was a David Bowie clock. I was never really sure if he ever actually liked touring. He was working in the early ’70s with another promoter called Mel Bush, so I didn’t work with him again until 1976, and the White Light Tour. He hadn’t worked in London for three years, and he created one of the most spectacular shows I’ve ever seen, the Thin White Duke Tour. David and I seemed to get on quite well, so he left Mel Bush and came with me, and we did this series of shows at Wembley Arena. To this day they are some of the best shows I’ve ever seen, completely spectacular. The whole stage was just strips of fluorescent lighting. Then we did the Serious Moonlight Tour, when he decided to come back in a major way. We did three shows at Milton Keynes Bowl, we played Croker Park in Sunderland, we did Murrayfield, we did everywhere. These were big, big shows. These were the shows that made him a proper, global superstar, someone who could command a stadium, who had that genuine breadth of appeal. At this point in his career he could have done anything.
EARL SLICK: I arrived in Brussels in 1983, for the start of the Serious Moonlight Tour, and that was the first time I’d seen David since 1975. I checked into my room and literally two minutes later there’s a knock on the door and it’s David. We went out to a café as we had to clear the air. He told me his story, I told him mine, and we realized that each of us had gotten it wrong. The stories didn’t match. We both got done. There had been lots of management issues at the time with Michael Lippman, who was managing us both, but we both got our feelings out of our system, so it was OK. He was a lot more lucid and a lot more approachable at that point. This time around we were doing stadiums, and in eight years he’d gone from doing twenty-thousand seaters to sixty-thousand seaters. We traveled in style, and everything was a lot easier. He had straightened his money out too, and Bill Zysblat was involved, and he was great to work with. The tour ended in Hong Kong on the anniversary of John Lennon’s assassination. We played “Imagine” in his honor that night. He told me he was going to start another record at the beginning of the year, but I didn’t get the call. So I guess I was out again.
BONO: I imagine I first met David in May 1983 at the US Festival, which was a giant event in the depths of California. Believe it or not, it was put on by Steve Jobs’s [business] partner, Steve Wozniak, trying to throw a lot of money away. The Clash and Bowie and U2 were on, and I think it may have been there. He was probably the last rock star I could believe in, because after him came punk, and then we weren’t allowed to believe in rock stars anymore. So he was the last one I gave myself permission to believe in. It’s funny; my heroes become more so the more human they are. Getting to know David over the years as a person, he increased in stature for me, not decreased. Which I think is unusual. You know, when you find that they’re not immortal. They’re mortal and they smoke too many cigarettes, and they’re a bit paranoid and a bit bitchy, and laugh a little loud. That just made me love him more. I wasn’t expecting that sort of comeliness from the music. The otherworldliness was in the music, but the worldliness was in the man in person. And I find them to be very amusing.
We didn’t discuss madness but we did discuss alienation, and he did it in a very wry way. He said, “Oh, the alienated love me!” He said, “Oh God, spare me from fucking alienation.” He had this quite sparky personality, he was fun. And the darker side, which I did see, it was there, but he knew that he did alienation better than anyone. He also knew that for people who had difficulty forming, that he was often a role model, in his formlessness, in his shape-shifting self. People who had gone through difficult times in their teenage life, and it wasn’t just sexuality, it was about anything, and he had this unbelievable ability to be inchoate, this sort of inchoate cry, saying it’s OK to be lost. You can’t underestimate that. Because being a songwriter you can sort of surrender to their melancholy, and you might too, but it’s all a bit crying into your beer. But his was like, defiance, like it was OK. You can never deny what that meant to your life, having him in that very special defiant way. Not in that way like, “Oh you poor thing, you’re going through something.” Lots of songwriters have approached that, but his was like, “You’re going to shine, you’re going to be a star, you can do anything you want”—that sort of thing. It’s amazing.
I spent a day with him backstage at his famous Milton Keynes concerts when he was promoting Let’s Dance in 1984, and then a few months later we ended up at the same party at the Notting Hill Carnival (at the home of a mutual friend, a Stiff Records alumnus called Cynthia Lole, who was about to start work on Absolute Beginners). The only details I can remember were that I had my head shaved after losing a bet with my friend Robin and that Bowie chain-smoked. I can’t remember if he was still drinking at the time (I think not), but he smoked like a monkey in a glass box. Like many other journalists, I was flattered by his attention, and at one point even considered that we might actually be “friends.” We weren’t, and never would be, but I certainly got to know how his mind worked, and saw how he would size up people, situations, and culture—books, records, films—and analytically disassemble them for his own benefit. Bowie was the quintessential cultural magpie, and nothing was safe in his company. If it wasn’t nailed down, he would have it. Metaphorically speaking, of course. He would make contact at the most inconvenient times, luring you into his web and making you feel as though you were the most important person in the world. You knew you were sort of being conned, but you didn’t mind, as he was so unbelievably charming. He had the same thing George Martin had, an ability to talk to you for the first time and make you believe that not only had you suddenly bonded, but that everything you said was of paramount importance. Once, as we were chatting in the Halkin Hotel behind Buckingham Palace, we spent a good hour discussing exactly why Robbie Williams was famous. This would have been in about 2002, when Bowie was thinking of releasing an album called Toy, which was going to be made up of covers of some of the songs he’d released in the ’60s. He seemed to be somewhat bewildered by Robbie’s success, as to him he appeared to be little more than an exotically homespun old-school song-and-dance man. Bowie had spent most of his career following his instinct and hoping it would collide with public taste, and so when he was presented with a phenomenon that he didn’t understand (like Robbie Williams), he wanted to get to the bottom of it. Bowie was mock-incensed that Robbie had co-opted so much of the John Barry Bond theme “You Only Live Twice” for his song “Millennium,” and wondered how on Earth he had got away with it.
DAVID BOWIE: I was never actually a material person. Ideas always meant a lot more to me. I never bought a big car. The company bought a big car for me to drive around in once. I had a limo in 1973 and ’74 but I’m not a limo person. And I’m not a sports car person. Those kinds of things really aren’t something I work for. All the money I’ve made has been since 1980, as everything before that just went. Let’s Dance helped, and 1983 for me was like manna from heaven. All that money I’d gone through in the ’70s suddenly came back to me, in almost a year. I’m not wealthy, I’m rich, and there’s a difference. The rich know how much money they’ve got, and the wealthy don’t.
CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY: I remember watching a mini documentary that was part of one of the videos of the Serious Moonlight Tour, and apart from the fact that he appeared to have a meringue on his head—and lots of people had meringues on their heads in the ’80s—they showed him in Singapore being shown around a market, with his hands behind his back, and he’d become the dashing English gentleman about the arts. I thought, Bloody hell, he’s turning into Prince Charles. It was almost, “Well, that’s very interesting. What do you do?” as he was being wheeled about by these local dignitaries. I was expecting him to be quite remote when I first met him, and in a way he was being remote but behind a very cordial front. The thing about Bowie was, you might not see him for seven or eight years, but when you did he’d start talking as though you’d just seen each other the previous week. In those holy and less guarded days, I remember when we were doing the interviews at the Chateau for Pin Ups, Joe Stevens the NME photographer kept giving Bowie spliffs. And he’d say he had to go in a few minutes, and then Joe would give him another joint and he’d stay another twenty minutes. He was matey when he wanted to be, and very good at being remote when he wanted to be, but David could have given charm lessons to Tony Blair and Mark Ellen.
ARTHUR FOGEL (PROMOTER): If you look at the bookends of his career, he was a left-of-center artist, and it was only with Serious Moonlight that he had this moment of great commercial success. There are different tribes of artists, and some are very much into the idea of making a record and then touring it, and reconnecting with their audience, not just for financial reasons, but for emotional ones. David wasn’t that person. He enjoyed it, but he didn’t enjoy it. The travel, the logistical stuff I don’t think he liked. It wasn’t the be-all and end-all, like it is for other artists. However, his instincts were second to none, and he was one of the greatest performers of them all. Sometimes I would watch him from the side of the stage and think he was the epitome of the quintessential rock god. He had the look, and the vibe, and the history. In some ways I think of him as that incredibly cool guy, maybe the coolest guy ever, in a suit. When the world was trying to be cool, he didn’t really have to be. It was effortless. He was very comfortable with who he was, and his legacy. It became natural for him. I’m not sure there was any artist who had more influence among other artists, and what greater validation can you have?
HARVEY GOLDSMITH: Even when he was at the height of his drug addiction, it really wasn’t that obvious. He was a bit distracted at times. When you were on the road with him you were aware that he was in a bit of a haze, but he was experimenting. He changed completely for the Serious Moonlight Tour, but then you have to appreciate that artists go through different periods all the time. He was extremely happy, possibly happier than he’d ever been before, but then he said creatively he was at his weakest.
DENIS O’REGAN: For the Serious Moonlight Tour, with that number of flights in such a short space of time, it was almost all private jets. So something was bound to happen. We were in the bar one night, with the pilot, the night before a flight. We were going to Berlin again. The next day we were inside the plane, sitting on a semicircle of seats. And it’s the only time in my life I’ve ever seen a bunch of people turn completely white, because we all thought we were dying. There’s a corridor out of West Berlin, and the pilot aborted the first take off, and the pilot said, “Ha-ha-ha…” and we all just thought, He’s pissed! And he turned the plane round and took off, and when we reached that point where the plane leveled out, the plane dropped, and that’s when we all thought we were dying. When we landed, David got out and fired the pilot, the air company, on the tarmac.
PAUL MCGUINNESS: I met him again in the ’80s, when both he and U2 were on tour in Australia, and Bono and I met him one afternoon and went to a pool hall, where we played a lot of pool and drank a lot of beer. Bowie was incredibly maudlin. He really didn’t look like the kind of person who had recently had the kind of extraordinary success that he’d just had with Let’s Dance. I wouldn’t say he was envious of U2, but he thought the world had overlooked him, he thought the world has passed him by. Of course, we thought that he’d had this incredible renaissance, as he had just had these huge global hits, with “Let’s Dance” and “China Girl,” but he didn’t see it that way at all. He thought that he’d sold out, or somehow ruined whatever credibility he had. He may have just been drunk, but he was very unhappy that he wasn’t taken seriously enough. Bono remonstrated with him and obviously told him that he was very highly regarded, and that after all he was David Bowie. But he didn’t see it that way.
CHALKIE DAVIES: I don’t think people realized that he lived in Australia for ten years on and off, as he had a place there in Sydney. It really helped him relax. In Switzerland I always felt he was living in a sad state of isolation. You could telex him but you couldn’t call him, as he was sort of isolated by Coco. Just saying the words “Coco Schwab” could make an entire football stadium terrified, but in actual fact she was really quite sweet. The first time anyone knew he was spending time in Sydney was when he made the video for “Let’s Dance” down there. He was an incredibly private man and yet had a network of hundreds of us who were told, if you see photographers, stylists, fashion designers, music, anything, keep me informed. People wonder how he always kept on top of things, but he kept on top because he had everybody telling him what was going on. Whenever I photographed him, I couldn’t get more than five or six frames of any setup, as he always wanted to move on to the next thing. He’d be bored. He once threw a full-length coat up in the air, put his arms out, looked at the camera, and it’s a perfect shot. Just one frame. Nobody moved like him, his movements were incredible. I used to ask him which frame he liked best, and he would say, “I have no idea. You pick.” This was a man who looked in a mirror but didn’t stare at himself in the mirror. He had absolutely no vanity. He also had a great way of putting people at ease, by going round the studio introducing himself. He knew the effect he had on people. At Julien Temple’s wedding he went up to my assistant, who wasn’t wearing a tie, and he said, “I’m so glad I’m not the only one not wearing a tie.”
Having become a global superstar in the summer of 1983, with the release of Tonight in September the following year, Bowie’s seemingly innate sense of cool evaporated, almost instantly. It was as emphatic as it was temporary, and yet it seemed almost inevitable. After Let’s Dance, Bowie was owned by everyone, and for a while there didn’t appear to be anything special about him; so much so that I distinctly remember being in the i-D office in the spring of 1984 and being asked if I wanted to appear in the extended promo film Julien Temple was making to support the album, Jazzin’ for Blue Jean, and rather snottily turning it down. Implausible, I know, and absurd to think of now, but that’s how uncool we thought David Bowie was in 1984, when notions of cool were bestowed and terminated often within hours of each other. The album—which in general sounded like a collection of Thompson Twins outtakes (note: bad thing)—actually produced two Bowie classics, though: one singular and destined to become much loved, “Loving the Alien,” and one that most people have probably forgotten, “Don’t Look Down.” A generic white reggae yacht rock cover of a song from Iggy Pop’s 1979 album New Values, it nevertheless manages to capture completely the low-gear experience of walking along a Caribbean beach at sunset. It’s not transgressive, not all that clever or very grown-up, but it proves that when he wanted to, Bowie could be as dismissively B+ as any other member of the rock aristocracy. “What I suppose I really wanted to do was to work with Iggy again,” he said. “That’s something I’ve not done for a long time—and Iggy wanted us to do something together. We worked very much the way that we did on Lust for Life and The Idiot, and I often gave him a few anchor images that I wanted him to play off—and he would take them away and start free-associating and I would then put that together in a way that I could sing. Rather than write straightforward songs, he would do collective imagery, and we’d rearrange things from there.” He also said it gave him a chance to record some more covers, like Pin Ups. “ ‘God Only Knows’ I first did—or tried to do—with Ava Cherry and that crowd the Astronettes when I tried to develop them into a group. It sounded like such a good idea at the time and I never had the chance to do it with anybody else again, so I thought I’d do it myself. It might be a bit saccharine, I suppose.”
Bowie would sometimes subscribe to the maxim, “One for them, one for me.” Tonight was definitely one for them.
SEAN DOYLE: Bowie followed Let’s Dance with Tonight, a blatant cash-in filled with woeful covers and some of the worst material he’d ever recorded. There is no great story behind the album’s creation: Bowie hadn’t made a record for EMI for a while and they wanted him to make one. He scrapped together some new songs and began recording in Switzerland, doing little to flesh them out before piling them in gaudy production. Horns squawk, faceless backup singers croon, guitars wail stupidly, Mickey Rourke (of all people) pops into a song to assist some kind of rap verse (of all things). It’s a laundry list of terrible decisions. Tonight is Bowie’s true artistic low, particularly its hysterical, schlocky, sacrilegious version of “God Only Knows.”
CARLOS ALOMAR: We were always trying to pluck songs from thin air. But in the ’80s, the complaint was pretty obvious—the record company making you go back in the studio. And there were no new ideas. Not on Tonight. For “Loving the Alien” I wanted it to be like Phil Spector, so Arif Mardin could put strings on top, and then we had to make something work for Tina Turner. So we were thinking about the collaborators, not about the songs themselves. We were floundering. We had also gone through a period of Iggy Popism. David wanted to help Iggy with his career, and Iggy wanted to help David with his drug problem. And so the best way for that to be achieved was to work, work, work.
HUGH PADGHAM: A friend of mine called Bob Clearmountain, who engineered Let’s Dance, had been asked to do Tonight, but he couldn’t do it because he was already booked to do a Bruce Springsteen record, I think. He suggested me instead, which is how I got the call. I was just brought in as an engineer to start with, as Bowie had found this chap called Derek Bramble, an English guy, to produce it. David fell out with him halfway through the record I think, and we had a break, and then he rang up and asked me to finish the album. We were at this place called Le Studio in Morin Heights, a ski resort a hundred miles north of Montreal. I’d worked there before because I’d mixed the Police’s Synchronicity there. But I don’t think I was the one who suggested it; I think he just wanted to get on with it, as it was the equivalent of a residential studio, i.e. not in a city. Saying that, I think he got bored of being there, and I always got the feeling he’d almost given up finishing the album in the best way that he could, and he just wanted to finish it. Also, there was probably also an element of making sure David was hundreds of miles away from temptation, although there were various ladies who were chauffeured up from Montreal and New York. It was about six months before I was due to get married, and I remember he’d brought this girl up from somewhere, but she came with a friend, and the girl wouldn’t come without her friend. So he was desperate for me to have the friend, but I couldn’t.
It was very frustrating for me, because coming in halfway through, I just didn’t get a lot of the music. Going back into the studio so soon after Let’s Dance…[was maybe a mistake]. Because I’d been so busy myself—with engineering there is a huge amount of quite tedious stuff you need to do in the studio—I didn’t realize that he hadn’t had much time to prepare anything. He turned up with some demos, which Carlos said he’d never done before, but because he wanted to keep the momentum going, and probably because of pressure from the studio, he just wanted to get into the studio. Derek Bramble’s forte was more soul-orientated, as he had been in Heatwave, which Rod Temperton was in, and who wrote for Michael Jackson. The thing is, he didn’t have very much experience. For instance, when we were doing a vocal, he kept saying to David, “Do it again,” and I’d look at David and mouth, “Why?” David is probably the best and quickest singer I ever worked with. He would just go into the studio and sing it twice, at the most, and it would be amazing. Literally faultless. He knew he didn’t have to do it more than once or twice. David probably thought that he was the one who’d taken Nile Rodgers out of disco land, so he thought, I’ll discover the next person. Secondly, there was a little bit of cheapskateness in there too—he probably thought that he gave away too much money on the last album, and thought he could get away with giving Derek half the number of points. Cynical, but maybe true.
I feel very privileged to have worked with David, but also slightly pissed off that it was on one of his worst records. We also had a lot of better tracks that he couldn’t be bothered to finish as he just wanted to get out of there. I can’t remember what they were, they were just called numbers 1, 2, and 3. I didn’t really like “Blue Jean,” as I thought it was really lightweight. I didn’t like “Tonight,” as I didn’t like the faux reggae thing. And then I thought, David Bowie with Tina Turner? It was a bit like David doing “Dancing in the Street” with Mick Jagger; it debased him. There wasn’t much original material on Tonight. And “God Only Knows” was a bit of a dodgy song to cover. I’ve never thought it was a good idea to cover a classic unless you have a fairly strong chance of improving it, which is unlikely, or subverting it in some way. When I was working with Phil Collins we decided to cover the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love,” but it only really worked because he was a man, and so it was a completely different version. “God Only Knows” was bad judgment. My production had too much reverb and pomposity on it. Tina Turner was at the height of her fame then, and she was absolutely charming, but she was only there for a couple of days.
David’s whole thing was vibing everybody up. He was a collaborator. He was fun, and had a great chuckle. Everybody got on. We lived in this little house about half a mile from the studio, and I always knew when it was time to get up, because whenever he woke up he would have this amazing coughing fit when he lit up his first fag. His voice was great, though—perfect, really. When we were recording “God Only Knows,” he said, “My voice is actually a complete steal from Scott Walker and Anthony Newley.”
DAVID BOWIE: My biggest mistake during the ’80s was trying to anticipate what the audience wanted. On the one hand I was trying to shed this skin and on the other I was second-guessing the future. I hated myself during that time, but I probably hated myself more during the mid-’70s, during the drugs and what-have-you, but I suppose my depression and alienation were in keeping with the times. I had a very crystallized idea of where I was misguided and unfocused during both periods. I said to myself, “I don’t wish to live my life like this; I have to change or else I will do something stupid.” Strangely enough my ambition tends to come in moments of depression. I think it’s always been this way, actually. Of course, it wasn’t just the second-guessing of the audience that was a mistake during the ’80s, creatively I allowed myself to go in a direction I shouldn’t have gone. I was trying to be predictable, but nobody wanted predictable.
In terms of mistakes, there were a couple of albums that I rushed into, that I really should never have done. I was pressured by a record company, but not manipulated. I regret Tonight specifically, only because taken individually the tracks are quite good but it doesn’t stand up as a cohesive album. That was my fault because I didn’t think about it before I went into the studio. Everyone takes notice of some kind of criticism. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t respond to how your own work is received. I won’t mention who they are for obvious reasons, but there are two or three critics that I actually take great note of. A couple of times one particular guy has written things, and I’ve definitely taken note and thought, You know, he’s actually hit it right on the head. Not that I would ever dream of telling him!
JULIEN TEMPLE: I was in L.A. when I got a call from someone who I soon found out was Coco asking me if I might be interested in working on a video with David, the film that eventually became Jazzin’ for Blue Jean, which was the big marketing exercise for the Tonight album. So I flew back to London, we met, and what I remember is that I was completely surprised by how ordinary he was. I was expecting The Man Who Fell to Earth, someone otherworldly, and what I got was Cheeky Dave. I wasn’t prepared for someone who was so matter-of-fact, and so straightforward. I had already had some experience of rock stars, and a lot of them appeared to be “on” all the time. Mick Jagger was always “on.” But with David he appeared to be able to switch on and off. Whenever he wanted. He appeared to be able to summon whatever it was he needed, whenever he liked. So the first meeting was rather disorientating, although intellectually we clicked. We collaborated on what would become this twenty-minute film for “Blue Jean,” and he was an absolute delight to work with. We even came up with the ending on the spot, when we’d run out of time and money, by feigning an argument between us and by breaking the fourth wall by having him yelling at me, the actor to director. He was very, very collaborative, and very keen that you got your point across. I think he felt that he was the casting director, and if he’d cast you properly, then he should just let you get on and do it. He wouldn’t micromanage, he’d really want you to do what he’d hired you to do. If you watch that film now, I still maintain that the “ordinary” version of himself that he plays in the film is the closest approximation of what David was actually like. It’s the nearest thing to the “real” David Bowie that’s ever appeared onscreen. He wasn’t exotic at all, he was just exotic when it suited him, or when it suited other people so much that he just did it to keep them happy. That was David. I actually think the exotic side of his character is based far more on his brother Terry. Terry was the mad one—literally. He was the wild one, the extrovert who devoured the underbelly of London. It wasn’t David. Terry fed David all this fabulous stuff when David was still very young and impressionable, and he carried it with him throughout his life. You could see it in the way he paraded around Soho when we were looking for locations—he was channeling his brother. It was remarkable the number of people who appeared to already know him, and also appeared to already know Terry. It was almost as though Soho was his second home.
One night we all went to see Purple Rain, David, Mick Jagger, and myself, and both of them were incredibly jealous of what Prince had managed to achieve. Neither Mick nor David had really established themselves as actors, although David had certainly made more films than Mick, yet here he was the new kid on the block making a huge name for himself. David was actually quite irritated that the film was so good. Mick and David were both so competitive, but they’d both been beaten to the punch.
Looking back through old Bowie interviews, it is notable how often he mentions Mick Jagger. At one point in the ’80s he told me: “I’m quite self-contained when I want to be. I like to get away from it all occasionally but I like a social life and I have a good one, so I’d miss that if I didn’t have it. The people I see aren’t usually involved in my particular career. They’re not usually musicians—there’s a few contemporaries, I guess, that I’m friendly with, like Iggy, naturally, and Mick Jagger. Everybody else is on a hello basis. I occasionally run into some of the newer guys. I got to know Nick Rhodes and Simon Le Bon from Duran Duran because we were in the same part of America together, and I really quite like them. They’re nice lads.”
CHRIS SULLIVAN (CLUB-RUNNER, DJ, JOURNALIST): You’d occasionally see him at the Sombrero in High Street Kensington at the end of the ’70s, but I didn’t actually meet him until he came down with Bianca Jagger to Hell one night, which was a one-nighter I was running in Soho in 1980. He had this soul-boy haircut, peg trousers, and a big brown tweed overcoat. It was early, empty, maybe only about six people there. My friend Christos [Tolera, the painter] went up to him and said, “Hello mate, how are you doing?” He thought he was an old soul boy he knew from Essex who used to go to the Lacey Lady. So Christos is asking him how he is and David Bowie doesn’t really know what’s going on, his eyes looking around the room. I think he may have been chemically enhanced at the time. Christos that is, not David Bowie. I think he went off that night with Helmut Newton. After he left, Christos came up to me and told me all about this guy he used to know and he was mortified when I told him he’d actually been talking to David Bowie for half an hour. I think Bowie was too polite to say anything. Christos said, “I thought there was something funny about him, because of his eyes. It must have been the drugs.” I said, “The drugs he took, or the drugs you took?”
Bowie also turned up when Iggy Pop was staying at my house in Kentish Town, as he was seeing a girl I knew who was staying with me and my wife. He’d just done this concert in Marseilles where he’d said all French people were fags, and had had the shit kicked out of him, so he was holed up in Kentish Town with us, trying to keep a low profile and staying away from the press. All his gear was there, all his clothes, his bags, his toothbrush, his work, everything. The next morning a cab pulls up and it’s David Bowie with Coco Schwab with Iggy’s passport, off to take him away. He was like a minicab driver. A very polite minicab driver.
When we launched the Wag Club in Wardour Street in 1982, he started popping in a lot, often with Julien Temple. He seemed to like Soho, loved seeing what was going on, soaking everything up. I was called one day at home and asked if I wanted to be an extra in Jazzin’ for Blue Jean, and when I turned up at six o’clock on the day of shooting they handed me a piece of paper and said, “These are your lines.” They weren’t the kind of lines I needed at six in the morning, let me tell you. For a person who runs a nightclub, six a.m. is like eight o’clock in the evening. Anyway, I had to do my thing as David Bowie is up a ladder, and I had to actually do some acting and I did it about six times and every time was worse than the last. He was very nice about it, and said it was the same for him on The Man Who Fell to Earth, which unsurprisingly didn’t make me feel any better.
DAVID BOWIE: I always looked OK in clothes—I was kind of a target for designers, always. They sort of made a beeline for me and tried to get me to wear their things. But I guess it was up to me to choose which ones I would wear. The thing is, I always wore clothes for a reason, not to be fashionable. I’ve never seen the point of being fashionable, as then you obviously just look like everyone else. Which is the one thing I have never, ever wanted to be. It doesn’t matter in what context you’re talking about, I never ever wanted to be, or look remotely like, anyone else. Sometimes I was right in what I chose, sometimes I wasn’t. I should never have touched the Culture Shock label in the early ’80s.
CHRIS SULLIVAN: He knew people in Soho too. We went to dinner at l’Escargot one night and everyone knew him.
He then asked me to get some people involved in Absolute Beginners, so I helped him get Sade and Slim Gaillard, Eve Ferret, and lots of Soho faces. I loved working on that, as Absolute Beginners was one of the reasons I came to London in the first place. I’d spend a lot of time on set and would often babysit Duncan. He would have been twelve, thirteen at the time. He’d never heard a Welsh accent before, and I think he loved being there. He later told me it was those daily trips on set that made him want to become a film director. His dad would take him around, show him what was going on, introduce him to the cameramen. A proper dad. No wonder Duncan turned out to be so level-headed. Bowie was doing some filming at the Wag one day and because he was using my office as a dressing room he insisted on making me cups of tea. I said, “You don’t have to do that,” but he insisted. He’d never pass you in the street, always said hello. I’d bump into him in St. Martin’s, Vogue House, anywhere, and he’d always say hello. He had a great ability to make people feel special. He was the most amazing man because you’d be chatting to him, and then he’d be called up for a take, and suddenly he’d turn into David Bowie. He’d just turn it on. Amazing. Boom. Now I’ll be David Bowie. He’d come back and says, “How was that?” I mean, what do you say?
DUNCAN JONES (FILMMAKER): In many ways it was an incredible childhood. We traveled all over the world and we got to do some amazing things. I remember one time going to see a sumo wrestling show in Japan and being amazed. There were a lot of unique things that I got to do, and not a lot of people get to experience things like that. And I treasure those memories. But often I’d sit around being bored backstage at a concert. You know, it was like any kid going to watch his dad at work, no matter what they do. We were just waiting for the concert to be over so we could go home. I could hear the noise up front but I’d spend most of my time hanging out with the roadies and playing with them. You know those big crash cases that they put the equipment in? Big, thick metal boxes with foam padding—well, I’d stand inside one of them and get the roadies to push me around like I was in a go-cart. Every night when we’d leave I can remember the big hullabaloo—security guards and me being whisked into the car before my dad came out separately so that they couldn’t get a picture of us together. The woman who was looking after me would have her arms wrapped around my head so that they couldn’t get my photo. It was a big event just to get in the car and go home. It was the opposite for me when Dad was shooting a film. That was like going to Disneyland. I’d see the amazing sets being built, how the makeup worked. In The Hunger, Dad had to age at one point to become an old man and I remember him scaring the shit out of me. I hung out with him when he was doing Labyrinth. And I remember the amazing ’50s Soho set on Absolute Beginners. All that made a huge impression on me.
I never learned to play an instrument. Dad tried to get me to learn the drums but I didn’t want to. “The saxophone?” No. “Piano?” No. “Guitar?” No thanks! Bless him. He kept on trying and nothing was happening.
He really enjoyed introducing me to new things in literature, music, and films. When I was about seven we’d watch these adventure movies like The Sea Hawk, a pirate movie with Errol Flynn, or James Cagney movies on video. Dad introduced me to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the original Baron Munchausen. He’d say, “You’ll love this! It’s amazing—you haven’t seen anything like this before.” I was eight when he showed me A Clockwork Orange. Around that time he showed me how to use an 8mm camera. It had the little Kodak cartridges that you stick in, and I remember it had the ability to shoot one-stop animation. I loved it and I’d take it with me when I went off on tour with him. I’d use my Star Wars figures and make these little animated films. He taught me, in a lovely way, the basics of making a movie, like how to do storyboards, write a script, do the lighting. He also taught me how to use a splicer—cutting the film and sticking it back together in the projector. I had this big blue box that was full of my storyboards and scripts. While Dad would go onstage, I’d be making my little movies.
CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY: I interviewed him when Tonight was coming out; in fact that was my last gasp as Bowie’s representative on Earth, because it was arranged that I would more or less get an exclusive interview which would be syndicated around the world. I knew someone who had made £50,000 out of syndicating an interview with Paul McCartney so I was getting very excited. Rolling Stone took it, as did the NME obviously, although I had to lie to the new editor, Neil Spencer, and tell him that it was completely exclusive. I didn’t tell him it was officially sanctioned and had actually been copyedited by Bowie himself. This was David at his most controlling, obsessive about the messages he was sending out. There was an editing session for the “Blue Jean” video with Julien Temple, and we all went and got drunk at Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues, a club deep in Soho, in Meard Street, near a knocking shop. That was fun because Bowie spent all night trying and failing to pull this beautiful black girl who worked on the door. He was a lad when he wanted to be. The rest of the night was spent swapping trivia about obscure R&B records, and he knew an awful lot about obscure R&B records. He could be a laugh could our Dave.
PAT METHENY (GUITARIST): I had written “This Is Not America” as the main theme for the score for The Falcon and the Snowman. After traveling to Mexico City, where the filming was taking place, and watching Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton do a few scenes, I went back to my room and the whole piece came very quickly. Later while in London recording the score, John Schlesinger, the director of the film, suggested a collaboration with David Bowie for a version of the song to go over the final credits. Honestly, at that point in my life, I was focused on music that was creative in a different way and was really not that aware of Bowie in general. When Mr. Schlesinger suggested him, I went out and bought a few records and realized that actually I was a big fan, and I agreed he was absolutely the perfect person to sing that song. David came to a screening and I sat near him as he saw the picture for the first time. He was very nice and seemed quite aware of my thing, which kind of surprised me. My first impression was that he was incredibly smart and very alert. During the screening, he had a yellow legal pad on his lap and was writing constantly. At the end of the film, he had a list of maybe thirty (brilliant) song titles that he had thought of while watching. One of them was “This Is Not America,” a line from the film.
By the time we went to Switzerland [to record with David], I had literally been up for three days straight finishing the score in London. It was one of those situations where they had added scenes, re-edited some cues, and generally wreaked havoc on what I had to deliver. And then, we had to go right from the studio to the airport to do this track for the final credits with David. I wish I had been a bit more rested to really enjoy it. Just watching him do his work was inspiring. He was just an excellent, amazing musician. After he had done the main vocal, he asked if any of us could sing, and as we couldn’t, he did all the background vocals himself, kind of transforming into what seemed to be two or three different people as he did each part. That was pretty amazing. We were both just trying to get the music right. As I recall, we did talk a fair bit about Ornette Coleman.