Siouxsie Sioux: Brand new people…
Everything Collapses
MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE weren’t the only post-emo outfit to revive the spirit of the literary cabarets in the early twenty-first century. The Black Parade appeared hot on the heels of Panic at the Disco’s debut album, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out — a record shot through with hot jazz rhythms and dressed to the nines in high literary style. Songwriter Ryan Ross poured ironies on his agonies and crammed so many sub-clauses into his parentheses that singer Brendan Urie just barely managed to fit the words between the beats. And yet the band always kept their cool — Ross’s tales of bad sex, cheap laughs and existential boredom were presented with a lip-sticked pout and a mascaraed wink. Emo kids the world over fell head-over-heels in love.
Caberet, as music writer Norman Lebrecht has observed, thrives in societies in decline. This might seem odd at first. Civilisation is falling down around your ears — is this really the best time to be drinking absinthe until two in the morning and experimenting with make-up? But for the cabaret singer, there is no better response to social collapse. Panic at the Disco know this instinctively. ‘Looks like the end of history’, sings Urie on Panic’s 2008 single, ‘Nine in the Afternoon’. ‘Oh, no — it’s just the end of the world.’ Urie delivers these lines like he’s seen it all before, and will see it again. In a sense, he has, and he will.
In Berlin, following the end of the First World War, the world was also about to end. Faced with a pile of war debts — debts which the shattered nation was in no position to repay — the German chancellory came up with the novel solution of simply printing more money. The value of the Deutschmark plummeted, and the moral standards of the capital fell quickly in its wake. Dostoyevsky, it seemed, had been right. The modern world’s shopkeeper philosophy had effectively replaced real values with monetary ones. Now that money was worth nothing, life had become meaningless. ‘Standards and values disappeared,’ writes musicologist Douglas Jarman. ‘Berlin was transformed into the Babylon of the world.’
But the collapse of morals turned out to be good news for the owners of nightclubs, where — as Jarman observes — business continued as usual. In the Berlin cabarets of the early 1920s, jaunty, jazz-inflected pop tunes told tales of political subversion and sexual perversion. Even after the mark stabilised in 1923, and Germany regained some sense of order, the cabarets continued to flourish as hotbeds of satire and sleaze. But after the Wall Street crash of 1929, Germany’s economy spiralled out of control again. Predictably, in the cabarets, business boomed. Once again, all bets were off, and everything was permitted, with the sole exception of bourgeois conformity — the cabaret’s arch-enemy.
In 1931 — with unemployment creeping toward the six million mark and the capital edging toward civil war — an English expat named Christopher Isherwood described a typical night on the town, in his novel, Goodbye to Berlin.
The couples were dancing with hands on each other’s hips, yelling into each other’s faces, streaming with sweat. An orchestra in Bavarian costume whooped and drank and perspired beer. The place stank like a zoo.1
Christopher’s closest friend in Goodbye to Berlin is a nightclub singer called Sally Bowles. Sally seems to survive on a diet of Prairie Oysters and cigarettes. She refuses Christopher’s offers of more substantial fare by saying:
I just don’t want to eat anything at all. I feel all marvellous and ethereal, as if I was a medieval saint or something. You’ve no idea how glorious it feels… Have a chocolate, darling?2
Like many of Christopher’s friends in Goodbye to Berlin, Sally has lost the trick of acting naturally, if she ever had it. But to compensate, she has become very good at acting — and not just on the stage. Sally is unconvinced by life — reality seems unreal to her. Nazi Putsch or Communist Revolution? Eat and live or starve and die? Have another chocolate, darling? But despite Sally’s inability to take it seriously, reality won’t go away either. So Sally — being a consummate professional — has resolved to put in a convincing performance.
Isherwood had no way of knowing it, but his snapshot of Berlin on the brink would go on to become one of the founding texts of glam rock. Isherwood’s portrait of a decadent society in decline in Goodbye To Berlin, his characters’ ironic, detached attitude to life — even the book’s title — would provide David Bowie with the atmosphere of his sequel to Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane. In Goodbye to Berlin, the news is all bad; one newspaper headline reads
EVERYTHING COLLAPSES.3
And this is precisely the reason why no-one seems to care very much about anything besides having a good time. In the face of the apocalypse, what else can you do? Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust had begun with the news that the world would end in five years. Now, in Aladdin Sane, Bowie announced that there was no reason why you shouldn’t do whatever you liked. Life was simply a tragedy, which would soon be over. Might as well have some fun. ‘Panic in Detroit’ describes a society in its death throes — the kids turn up at school and find that their teachers have simply stopped work. Sure, children are the future — but what if there’s no future? The kids scream, run out into the street and start smashing things. Bowie reports on this with his usual combination of alien detachment and high melodrama.
On the album’s best song, ‘Time’, Ziggy puts the fate of humanity into perspective. It’s a cabaret number — the singer sits on a bar stool smoking a cigarette while pianist Mike Garson throws Schoenbergian shapes over his keyboard, complicating ‘Time’’s Weimar-jazz arrangement with expressionist dissonances. ‘Time!’ sings Ziggy,
He speaks of senseless things
His script is you and me4
‘Time’, like many of Bowie’s songs, betrays the influence of composer Kurt Weill — a songwriter who virtually epitomised the cultural world of the Weimar Republic. In his memoir, A Little Yes and a Big No, the painter George Grosz recalled that ‘you could hear [Weill’s] songs everywhere you went in those days’.5 Weill inherited the Wagnerian ideal of music-theatre as a means to repair a fragmented society. But he had no time for Wagner’s emotional excesses. Weill replaced the Ring of the Niebelungen with the Threepenny Opera, the most famous of his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. The opera’s best-known song, ‘The Ballad of Mack the Knife’, is typical Brecht–Weill. It observes the worst aspects of human behaviour in a society on the brink, but does so over a tune that once heard, never leaves your head. Later in the 70s, Bowie would record Weill’s ‘Alabama Song’, perform many of his songs live, and come very close to starring in a film adaptation of The Threepenny Opera.
Bowie’s interest in Weill’s music was part of a larger fascination with Weimar culture. He was (and still is) a keen admirer of expressionist painting and film — the set designs for his Diamond Dogs tour were strongly influenced by The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Metropolis. Later, when glam rock went mainstream, he said he felt very upset that ‘people who’d obviously never seen Metropolis and had never heard of Christopher Isherwood were becoming Glam Rockers’.6 In the summer of 1976 he and Iggy Pop moved into an apartment in Isherwood’s old neighbourhood, the Schoneburg district of Berlin. On the cover of Heroes, he made an explicit homage to the expressionists, posing in imitation of an Erich Heckel painting he’d seen at Die Brücke museum. In the photo, Bowie’s hands are raised at an awkward, theatrical angle, bent out of shape by the stress of modern life. His face has been reduced to a black and white mask, his cheeks are hollow, his eyes have a haunted look.
This portrait of Bowie is also a very close cousin to the one of Iggy Pop on the cover of The Idiot — an album Bowie produced and played on while the two were living in Berlin. On ‘Nightclubbing’, the pair takes us with them on one of their nocturnal escapades through the divided city:
The brand-new people do brand-new dances, he tells us, ‘like the nuclear bomb’. This, as you’ve probably guessed is the dance of the damned. Why not twist your body out of shape and wreck yourself with pills and liquor? With everything collapsing, anything goes.
Bowie’s timing was, as usual, impeccable. The same year, the Sex Pistols declared that, in the face of the apocalypse, morality was bunk. ‘When there’s no future, how can there be sin?’ asked Johnny Rotten. ‘We’re the future,’ he insisted, pointing to the nocturnal freaks crawling out of the city’s garbage, ‘your future!’8 Sure enough, Iggy’s new people had appeared, growing out of the city the way Cesare seemed to grow out of the expressionist décor in Caligari. Drawn by the aura of sin and subversion around the Sex Pistols and their manager, Malcolm McLaren, a strange crowd of teenagers from the London suburb of Bromley joined the group’s entourage early in 1976. Siouxsie Sioux was eighteen at the time, and was determined to propel herself as far as possible from the stifling conformity of Bromley. She’d already tried to find work as a model, but the agencies had rejected her because she was too skinny and wore too much make-up. Anyone else might have been disheartened by this, but Siouxsie was already cultivating a personal style that had nothing whatever to do with the blonde, healthy, suntanned look the agencies were after. She’d first seen the light three years earlier while lying in a hospital bed, recovering from a serious illness. Switching on Top of the Pops, she saw David Bowie singing ‘Starman’. It was, as Siouxsie’s future collaborator Robert Smith once told Richard Kingsmill, the sort of thing that changes lives.9 Bowie looked deathly pale, painfully thin, generally unwell…and fabulous! Siouxsie cheered up instantly. ‘I’d lost so much weight and got so skinny that Bowie actually made me look cool.’10
By the time she’d fallen in with the Sex Pistols, Siouxsie had turned ill-health into a fashion statement — and something more, an existential protest against bourgeoise comfort. Pale skin and dark eyes said to the world: ‘I am a creature of the night — I stay up too late and punish my body in unthinkable ways. But I do it because I will never settle for the half-life of the suburbs, the stifling comfort of work, dinner, TV, sleep, work…’ Siouxsie and her friends — John, Blanche, Tracey and Berlin — knew they were better than this, and set out to prove it in every way. ‘The only thing that was looked down upon,’ she told Jon Savage, ‘was suburbia. I hated Bromley: I thought it was small and narrow-minded. There was this trendy wine bar called Pips, and I got Berlin to wear this dog-collar, and I walked in with Berlin following me, and people’s jaws just hit the tables… People were scared!’11
Berlin was only fifteen years old, but had already reinvented herself as a Weimar-era nightclub singer in bowler hat and fishnets. Cabaret, as Norman Lebrecht has observed, thrives in societies in decline12 — which is why Bowie used it as one of the harbingers of the apocalypse on Aladdin Sane. Berlin from Bromley sensed this connection between England circa 1976 and Germany 1929 intuitively. ‘I can’t tell you the parallels between those days and Goodbye to Berlin,’ she told Jon Savage. ‘We were living it out, the whole bit.’13
Berlin knew what a society in decline felt like from Isherwood’s novel. But she knew what it looked like because she’d seen the movie. Goodbye to Berlin had first been adapted as a popular play called I Am a Camera, then a musical with songs by Fred Ebb and John Kander in 1966 (which Bowie saw as a teenager and loved), and finally, as a film directed by Bob Fosse and released in 1972 as Cabaret.14 Joel Grey, who plays the MC at the Kit Kat Klub, was one of the few actors to be retained for the movie from the stage version. In the film, Grey wears a thick mask of black and white make-up that pushes his face into an exaggerated smirk, like an expressionist painting come to life. ‘Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome!’ he sings, by way of greeting the assortment of local scene-makers and gawking tourists who’ve come to see the show. He hams, winks and mugs his way through his duties, a model of ironic detachment and nocturnal sleaze. For the Bromley contingent, Grey’s show stealing performance embodied a whole philosophy of life.