David Bowie: He wrote his own requiem - he was always a lap ahead

For the past 18 months, while creating his final album Blackstar, David Bowie knew he was dying. Richard Godwin on a musical genius who challenged and outsmarted us - right to the very end
One step ahead: David Bowie wrote his own requiem with Blackstar
Sky Atlantic/YouTube
Richard Godwin11 January 2016
The Weekender

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There was a widespread sense of bewilderment as the world awoke to the news that David Bowie is no longer here - a feeling that no one really saw this coming.

Bowie has inhabited so many different roles over the years that the loss feels plural, as if many spirits have died.

But once you get a handle on the sadness and surprise, you have to marvel at the theatrical timing. It was only on Friday - his 69th birthday - that Bowie released Blackstar, a mournful and elliptical album that now stands as his final masterpiece.

If you look at the reviews (my own included), you’ll notice the words “elegaic”, “reflective”, “cryptic” crop up a lot.

We registered the mysterious references to death and illness: “How many times does an angel fall?”.... “Something happened on the day he died...” “I’ve got scars that can’t be seen”.

We shuddered at the final, unsettling, unsentimental image we have of him - in the video for the single, Lazarus, his face contorted in anguish, his eyes covered in bandages with buttons for eyes.

But we didn’t quite piece it all together. Bowie was, as ever, half a lap ahead.

Over the past few years, Bowie has been leaving the clues for us to interpret - and misinterpret. (It seems typical that when the rumours of his cancer struggle came out, they were soon dismissed as a hoax.)

From the surprise release of The Next Day (2013) — which signalled his late-period rejuvenation — there has been a sense that Bowie both wants to reclaim and disinherit his past.

That year saw the widely acclaimed retrospective, David Bowie Is..., at the V&A, which became the museum’s fastest-selling exhibition ever and cemented his status as a true innovator in the worlds of fashion, film and visual art.

We’ve also seen a rash of reissues - such as the Five Years set, covering his super-fertile period 1969-1973 when he transformed British attitudes to homosexuality - which have felt as if he was trying to get a handle on his musical legacy.

David Bowie - in pictures

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As it stands, it is hard to overstate his impact. John Lennon once played him down as “rock ’n’ roll with lipstick on” but if anything, over the past decade or so, he has come to eclipse The Beatles as the lodestar of British pop music.

It was not only his ability to write songs in a variety of registers — from space operas to apocalyptic knees-ups, from Velvet Underground stomps to kooky lullabies.

It was his anticipation and embrace of wider cultural movements.

He championed the unfashionable and made it fashionable, associating himself with whoever — bringing Jean Genet, Jacques Brel, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed into popular embrace, a spirit that continues with his collaboration with avant-garde jazz musicians of the Donny McCaslin Quartet on Blackstar. He was never boring.

And whereas The Beatles now sound comforting — enfolded into the heritage industry — Bowie’s sound is still unsettling.

Icon: David Bowie performs live at Ahoy, Rotterdam on May 13th 1976
Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns

Even his most approachable records are full of discomfiting moments, such as the occultism and fascism that streaks the singalongs of Hunky Dory (1972). But then his greatest moments were all to do with challenging, with broadening the palate of music.

There was the glorious cover of The Man Who Sold the World (1970), in which he reclines on a chaise longue in suburban noweheresville in a dress.

There was the famous moment he put his arm around guitarist Mick Ronson while performing Starman on Top of the Pops, scandalising the nation with his sexual ambiguity.

GQ editor Dylan Jones recently wrote a 200-page book about those three-and-a-half minutes of TV: “It was thrilling, slightly dangerous, transformative... For me, and for those like me, it felt that the future had finally arrived.”

But as one recent reviewer put it, only Bowie could have come up with a statement as unequivocal as “I’m gay and always have been” (as he did around the time of Ziggy Stardust) and deepen the mystery.

And few would have the courage to kill off their most successful persona — as Bowie did on the surprise announcement of Ziggy Stardust’s death at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1973.

But it is the restless reinvention that was his liberation. Each person can cherish their own David Bowie: the performance art Bowie, the California Bowie, the Berlin Bowie, the MTV Bowie (he was among the first to appreciate the significance of the pop video).

But his major legacy — even for children of the Eighties, whom he terrified with his appearance in Labyrinth — is a sense that being unsettled is good for you. But when I first really got into Bowie as a depressed suburban teenager, no other music provided such bleak comfort.

And so what of the runes in Blackstar? He started recording 18 months ago, around the time that he began his battle with cancer, which gives it the aura of a deliberate epitaph.

So too does the elaborate set-dressing in the title song, with its solitary candle standing in the Villa of Amen. It’s the only album where he doesn’t appear on the cover.

“Spirit rose a metre and stepped aside/Someone else took his place and bravely cried/I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar... I’m not a pop star, I’m not a pop star, I’m not a gangster.”

It has also been characterised as Bowie’s jazz record which isn’t quite right — it’s still a singer-songwriter record, only with a persistent discordant melancholy.

A few have noted the affinity with his late half-brother, Terry Burns: a schizophrenic who killed himself in front of a train in 1985.

It was he who exposed young Bowie to John Coltrane and encouraged him to take up the saxophone — and whenever the instrument appears on a Bowie record, it’s usually to indicate something is awry.

John Renck, the director of that haunting Blackstar video, said: “Music has traditionally been a tool for stating your mind or even for uproar or revolution. Unfortunately it’s lost that role a lot. But if anyone can bring cultural relevance back to music Bowie can.”

And yet, even with mortality, the video is still shot with lust, glamour and self deprecation. The man himself remains, a mystery, an enigma.

Musical contemporary Gary Kemp said today: “What is extraordinary and wonderful and a measure of the man is that the last song David gave to us is up there with some of his greatest.

"He placed what is probably the best song on Blackstar (with its now poignant widow’s weeds of a cover) last. ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’, he sings. An artist to the last.”

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