Well, what can you say? More specifically, what can I say?

I’ve set myself a precedent here for doing posts of this nature on the occasion of significant deaths, so can’t really bow out of this one.

Well, given the mountain of material we’ll shortly be chewing over from massive fans and self-proclaimed experts (for DB must be second only to BD when it comes to those guys) when the quote-unquote “music community” picks itself up off the floor over the next few days, I thought it might prove interesting to throw together a few thoughts from a… well, not a ‘non-fan’ exactly. Certainly not a hater or resenter or non-enjoyer, but just, well, y’know, he’s never been a big deal for me, the way he has for so many others. An ‘almost-fan’ let’s say. A ‘tipping-over-the-edge-into-fandom-not-quite-there-yet’ sort of deal.

Could such a piece be interesting? Well it probably wouldn’t be for most artists, but the sheer breadth and depth of Bowie’s hold over popular music is such that he still had an effect – dozens and hundreds of little effects, direct and second hand, all overlapping – on my enjoyment of music, and indeed yours too. Those of sufficiently wide listening who claims otherwise are probably either lying to themselves or playing an aggressively contrarian a-hole position for reasons best known to themselves. So…. Yeah. I have no particular conclusions to make here, but perhaps these formless reflections might amount to something. Let’s just see how it goes.

One thing you realise as you grow older as a music fan is that hating Bowie, like hating The Beatles, is a mugs game. The more time you waste bellyaching about their allegedly unjustified ubiquity, the more untenable your position becomes, as warm memories of melodies, lyrical flourishes, funny ideas and likeable images flood the minds of those you seek to convince, whilst your continued banging on rings hollow. Do us all a favour, leave it behind with the craftily rolled bedroom spliffs, UCAS forms and MOR emo-rock. ‘Suffragette City’ is on the radio. Drop your defenses and just smile, you twat. Life’s too short, etc.

Through teens & early’20s, I was disdainful of Bowie. I know that for many people (especially those raised in the ‘70s of course) he acted as a “gateway drug” in much the same way that Sonic Youth did for me, bridging mainstream-ish pop/rock and more challenging/underground concerns - but I came at him from the opposite angle. Already familiar with The Velvet Underground, Kraftwerk, Iggy, Syd Barrett et al by the time I began consciously considering his music, I largely saw him as some kind of magpie-like art-rock Machiavelli, cherry-picking ideas from all my messy, misunderstood faves and watering them down for tidy public consumption, reaping misappropriated plaudits for godlike originality from the uninformed in the process.

The fact that, at the time, he seemed largely concerned with making decidedly iffy ‘cyberpunk’ drum n’ bass tracks and telling everyone how much he liked The Pixies a decade after they split up only served to fuel this narrative, and as such I closed the case.

When, sometime around the turn of the millennium, NME did a big thing voting him “the most influential artist of all-time” or somesuch, and someone sent in a letter the next week saying “Sorry, all we had him down with is fucking up the production on ‘Raw Power’, signed, The Kids” I not only found it highly amusing, but more or less agreed.

The thing that changed my mind, basically, was song-writing. Specifically, a scratched up double A-side of ‘Life On Mars’ b/w ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ that I pulled out of my Mum’s long-neglected record collection whilst bored and in search of interesting stuff one summer. Now, say what you like about the big picture, but you can’t argue with material like that. Both songs remain shiver-up-the-spine-inducing to me to this day, not due to any memories or associations or whatnot associated with them, but just in and of themselves, as compositions and recordings. He wasn’t copping anyone else’s moves (as far as I know) when he sat down and knocked those two out, and even the most embittered Bowiephobe would be hard pressed to deny that they display the touch of an exceptionally gifted writer/arranger/performer.

I further began to contemplate the idea that DB was pretty damn good at this song-writing lark when considering the credits and background to an album I liked (and still like) a great deal, Iggy Pop’s ‘The Idiot’. What swiftly became clear upon closer examination was that this album was a Pop/Bowie joint through and through, with Dave’s generosity toward his troubled buddy being the only thing that allowed the Ig to take sole credit. In fact, with Bowie sharing a writing credit on every tune, producing, arranging, probably selecting and briefing the musicians and god knows what else, ‘The Idiot’ is arguably about 75% his gig, with Iggy merely contributing some lyrics, vocals and a slightly more nebulous sense of ‘attitude’.

Possibly not the most promising division of labour given the aforementioned flubbing of ‘Raw Power’s initial mixes, but somehow, it works splendidly. A perfect halfway meeting between Bowie’s consummate professionalism and Iggy’s feral wild man antics, ‘The Idiot’ presents a darker, more damaged and rockist take on many of the same tropes found in Bowie’s mid-‘70s output, and as such, it appealed more immediately to my punkoid sensibilities, further increasing my one-step-removed appreciation of Bowie’s talents.

The next step was a random VHS viewing of D.A. Pennebaker’s Ziggy Stardust documentary - a film whose visibility & historical significance has suffered hugely from the fact that it wasn’t widely released until over a decade after the events recorded within it (a particularly chronic failing where ol’ Chameleon Bowie is concerned). Taken on its own merits though, I think it’s an absolutely fantastic concert film, and one that I highly commend to fans of such things who may have overlooked it.

Although Bowie’s trotting out of songs by The Velvets and Jacques Brel (via Scott Walker) in his stage-show here does seem motivated more by an opportunistic attempt to steal their thunder than by a need to introduce his fans to the originators, I’ll nonetheless admit that the performances captured in the film still blew me away. Again, the feeling of grudging respect intensified. Well you can’t say he didn’t put on one hell of a show…etc.

Perhaps because some of the turns in the movie were so unexpectedly mind-blowing (‘Moonage Daydream’ with Mick Ronson contributing the most ludicrously OTT guitar solo I’ve seen in my life whilst the entire audience of teenage girls appear to lost in the throes of sexual ecstasy is pretty hard to beat as an absolute apex of never-to-be-repeated rock star ridiculousness), my subsequent belated acquisition of the Ziggy Stardust album felt like a bit of an anticlimax.

Well, I say that, but… mixed feelings, y’know? I mean, there’s certainly nothing anticlimactic about ‘Five Years’, that’s for sure. Jesus Christ. If he’d recorded that song and never done anything else in his entire life, I’d still be writing a generous old deathblog here today. Breathtaking. In fact, purely in terms of songwriting, most of the record is indeed the masterpiece people often claim it as. ‘Ziggy Stardust’, ‘Suffragette City’, ‘Rock N Roll Suicide’ of course, and the hilarious first few minutes of ‘Moonage Daydream’ (although the live version in the movie was much better). Oh, and ‘Lady Stardust’! My god, yeah, fantastic. Yes, there are five or six (or seven or eight) songs on there that are not to be messed with.

Nonetheless though, it’s not an album I’ve really felt the need to put on that often. I don’t know, it’s just…. something about the sound of the whole thing just bugs me. That oh-so-early’70s mixture of plinky-plonky pub piano, big ‘parody’ gestures and flat, “careful now, watch the levels” type production. It frustrates me in much the same way all those ‘70s Springsteen albums do. For all the rock n’ roll posturing, there’s just not a great deal of rock n’ roll happening here. Too much piano; too much saxophone; not enough guts. The material might be exceptional, the players might be great, but the performances sound way too neutered for my taste, dry and cold, and it’s no fun. You will disagree, of course, but what can I say?

To be honest, similar discrepancies between material and recorded sound compromise my enjoyment of most of the ‘70s Bowie albums I’ve taken the time to listen to front to back over the years. ‘Ziggy..’ aside, ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ is probably my favourite – some great songs on there, and quite a weird, tough sound, followed by about half of ‘Hunky Dory’, and after that he kinda loses me. ‘Aladdin Sane’ I couldn't hang with at all (although I like ‘Jean Genie’), and ‘Diamond Dogs’ gets WAY too overcooked / underpowered for my liking, much as I might love the artwork and concepts behind it. Never got that whole ‘thin white duke’/’Young Americans’ era either – I find it hard to get beyond the idea of it being a particularly contrived pastiche of a great form of music that really did not need his intervention.

Throughout all this, I suppose he just had an idea of what his records should sound like that was just a *little* too complacent and mainstream-acceptable for my liking, saturated as I am with what audiences at the time would have considered the real weirdy beardy stuff (Beefheart, Eno, Sabbath, Can etc.)

So then, I should love the ‘Berlin trilogy’, right? Well, I don’t really know, to be honest. These albums are so critically lauded and loaded with storied mythology of pre/post-punk gloom (of which I have little interest) I can barely even dare to approach them as an agnostic, uncommitted listener. Maybe one day I’ll finally put them on back to back and get the point? I hope so.

I mean, I’ll cop that if you’ve not heard ‘Heroes’ pop up unexpectedly on the radio and felt you’ve been hit in the stomach with a brick at least once or twice in your life, you must have a hard heart indeed, but beyond that… I dunno. They’re on the waiting list. Thereafter, I like ‘Ashes to Ashes’ and ‘Let’s Dance’ because they sound so weird, and… let’s cut the embarrassment and end this thing now shall we?

What this is all leading up to really is the horribly snide realization that, in the spirit of Alan Partridge, my favourite David Bowie album is probably ‘David Bowie’s Greatest Hits’ (yes, I do own it – I got it for DJing). Play that in isolation and you’d be hard-pressed to deny he was a real big fish in the small pond of chart-orientated white pop for most of his career, however much I personally might struggle with the deeper mysteries of his wider catalogue.

So where does all this mealy-mouthed hot n’ colding on the subject of Bowie’s recorded work leave me? I don’t know. An almost-fan? Is that an applicable status?

Actually, the more I’ve thought about it over the past few days, the more it seems to me that the veneration of Bowie is very much a generational thing.

As far as I know, most music fans in a vaguely similar age braket to myself take a similar approach to Bowie as the one I’ve outlined above. We like Bowie - maybe we even own a few of his records, and we’re happy when we hear his songs on the radio. But in no way can we comprehend the experience of really loving Bowie, the way that so many critics and musicians and DJs and pundits who were raised in the ‘70s clearly do (or did).

Growing up in the ‘90s, when the man himself was a bit of a has-been, headmaster-like figure, whilst the charts were frequently topped by ‘indie’ bands playing blatantly Bowie-derived material* and shops and libraries offered whole pantheons of ‘alternative’, non-mainstream music for us to explore on cheap CD reissues, we could take or leave his overriding influence really. His ‘meaning’ to us potentially didn’t extend much beyond that of some guy who did some good songs in the ‘70s.

For that older generation though, he was a BIG DEAL, a singular entity, an absolute game changer in a largely bland and stifling media landscape, where that particular combination of style, intelligence and transgression had no counterpart anywhere on the TV or in the mags. For a kid growing up in Britain in the early ‘70s, if you didn’t like heavy metal or prog or sensitive singer-songwriters, he must have been IT (T. Rex being unfairly dismissed by many as ‘kiddie stuff’, but that’s another story). And once you’ve got Bowie of course, you can find your way to Lou Reed, to Iggy, to Eno and Roxy Music and John Cale and Nico – inquisitive minds look further, doors to intoxicating new worlds open up. Like I say, a perfect gateway drug for that particular generation.

What percentage of early punks morphed out of an earlier identity as Bowie kids? Off the top of my head, I know members of bands as unlikely as The Germs and The Fall initially coagulated around their Bowie fandom… how many hundreds more did too? Of course, the best bands did not pass Go and went straight to The Stooges, but with three TV channels and the NME (or nearest local equivalent), many weren’t lucky enough to have that option. In short, the scatter-gun spread of his influence over those who defined half-decent music culture through the late ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s is incalculable, even if it is often unrecognisably diffuse.

Which leads me to wonder, if he was no great shakes for us ‘90s kids, how does he continue to figure for generations AFTER my own, who have largely grown up with him as a lauded cultural icon, curating festivals, wearing sharp suits and delivering ‘honest, disarming’ interviews left, right and centre?

Again, I don’t know. I suppose in the past few years, we’ve seen a big resurgence – led from the top of course - in the idea of the pop star as a kind of grand artistic visionary (witness second/third winds for the likes of Kate Bush, Laurie Anderson, David Byrne et al), and true to form, Bowie’s been all over this, meaning that it is likely to be in this mode that many obits will see him. Is this good, bad, appropriate, accurate, irrelevant? Will it mean anything to a 19 year old, a 90 year old, a 40 year old? I don’t know. I’ve said my piece, and just about run out of steam here I think.

R.I.P. David Bowie. He was never really my guy, but he seemed like a nice bloke, and he sure made some good songs.

Actually, you know what one of the best ones was? ‘Little Liza Jane’, by Davey Jones & The King Bees, 1965; I heard that on the radio yesterday for what I think might be the first time. Totally bad-ass! Sounds like Vince Taylor singing for The Yardbirds or something, brilliant rock n’roll….. and off we go again…..



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*One thing that occurred to me whilst listening to about four hours of tributes on the radio yesterday whilst doing the cooking & housework was that, alongside his myriad of cooler innovations, Bowie’s ‘70s material pretty much wrote the book for what eventually became ‘brit-pop’ – something I’d never much bothered to think about before. Consider: four minute plus ‘big singles’ in which mild-mannered rock arrangements are beefed up by horns, strings, keys and what-not; off-beat/culturally resonant verses matched up with immediate, ‘anthemic’ choruses; conscious attempts to fuse popular and critical appeal. It’s all there right? Not just Suede’s more obvious imitations, but Pulp, The Manics, Supergrass, even second-stringers like The Boo Radleys, Sleeper etc etc… Bowie owned that shit, far more than he did anything related to ‘krautrock’ or ‘the avant garde’ or whatever else his more high-falutin’ defenders may claim.

Labels: David Bowie, deathblog, rambling, thinkpiece