Dear me, I have to admit this is something of a tough read. A foreword for a book by David Currie that was eventually published by Legends Publishing in 2024 as a beautifully illustrated hardback entitled The Grand Illusion of David Bowie: Cosmic Jive, Sci-Fi And Living In The Times Of The Starman.
I’d actually drafted the less than laconic intro back in early 2019 and finished the thing off during a slightly trying jaunt one sleepy Sunday afternoon in the Cuban city of Cienfuegos. Though you can call it the Back Of Beyond.
Having just read the preface back for the first time in almost seven years even Stevie Wonder can see it’s far from a glowing appreciation, in fact it’s deliberately provocative, unfiltered and kinda brutal.
In my defence, my DNA dictates I never write terribly positively about anything when tired or under pressure. And trying to find a half-decent internet connection to send this to David from the renegade island’s ‘Pearl of the South’ (aka UNESCO historic takes precedence over anything as convenient as modern communications systems) proved so wearisome that when I asked for a coffee I half expected my local hosts to brandish two sticks to draw some water from a well while faxing Calcutta for advice.
Anyway, this is the fully unexpurgated unedited edition, and boy, was I on a mission.
Until 1983, David Bowie could do no wrong. Sure, he’d released the odd aberration like Under Pressure, the duet with Freddie Mercury and Queen that was far from being prime Bowie, but that seemed like a spirited lark done on the spur of the moment, separate from his cherished catalogue with RCA Records, the label that, in retrospect, released all his best work. Following the angsty artpop of 1980’s Scary Monsters album, Bowie had become a genre unto himself as scads of Blitz Kids and New Romantics all pounced on various fragments of his past artistic personae and elaborated on them to power dozens of careers.
The faithful had been waiting so long: three long years, an eternity in pop at the time. Bowie clones had come and gone during that time and he remained the éminence gris behind several contemporary trends and movements that had moved forward in his absence. Aping the Thin White Dame was good business for nearly a decade, reaching its zenith in the era of excess that ushered in Thatcherism, capitalism and the mantra “let’s make lots of money.” Symbiotically, it was also the time when David Bowie became a superstar, a deity and a very wealthy man. If you’d bought shares in Bowie in 1971, the year he — then a struggling, floppy-haired singer-songwriter more hippie than hipster — signed to RCA, the mid 1980s would have been the perfect time to cash out.
Stockholders would have made a mint, though having said that, they didn’t exactly do badly when that trailblazing ‘Bowie Bonds’ flotation actually became a reality around his 50th birthday. I became a teenager the year Bowie left RCA. As an adolescent of the time, my memories of the man they call The Dame are radically different to those who knew him from the 1970s. I didn’t know who David Bowie was in the Seventies, but that’s OK because he didn’t know who he was either. In fact, I’m not sure he ever really did.
Most casual observers of my generation knew David Bowie for his questionable duets with showbiz shags Mick Jagger and Tina Turner, or the hammy acting and codpiece calling of Labyrinth. That and a smattering of shiny and shallow ultra-commercial hits like Let’s Dance. I wasn’t taken in. In fact, 1983 was the start of my years of refusal to give entertain anything that had mass appeal. And boy, did Bowie have mass appeal in ’83.
My fellow freaks and I would sit outside Virgin Records in Central Milton Keynes every Saturday and sneer and snark at yet another person walking out carrying the shop’s translucent orange bag barely concealing a copy of Let’s Dance. The album or the single? It didn’t matter. We just didn’t want to be like them.
Let’s Dance certainly suited the times though: bombastic, over-produced and Bowie-style over substance. Singles were peeled off the album like hundred dollar bills off a pimp’s roll of filthy lucre. Perhaps best of all, Modern Love was a jaunty if superficial single for the times. As someone who only knew about four Bowie songs, all with that slightly portentous, much-mimicked baritone, it’s slightly embarrassing to admit that, as a song the BBC were most definitely playing on the radio, I liked this funny Little Richard-esque barrelhouse rocker the first couple of times I heard it… until a Radio 1 DJ mentioned it was David Bowie. “Oh, his voice sounded different. I don’t like it now I know it’s him,” I told friends. How tribal we were as kids, eh?
Modern Love was David Bowie recasting himself, yet again: now as a commercial counterfeiter for a debased time. “It’s not really work, it’s just the power to charm,” he grinned. It wasn’t how others must see the faker, it was how he saw himself. One thing about DB is that he usually did whatever he or his alter-egos wanted to do. In 1977, he engaged in a cheesy Christmas medley with Bing Crosby, during his austere Berlin noir period, and in 1996 found himself making a single with seminal synthpop duo Pet Shop Boys while plying his latest long-playing industrial slab of noise at rock festivals from Phoenix to Roskilde.
That schizophrenic quality meant Bowie always wished and hoped to bring his music to the widest possible audience whilst trying hard to retain his art-cool badge.
Of course, he always wanted to be a star, and the uptown commercialism of Let’s Dancewas calculated to be a huge hit by taking advantage of MTV’s ability to reach the young American consumer. Bowie had been filming music videos and performance clips since 1969’s Space Oddity—many of which were rarely seen at the time. So he cashed in a medium he’d been doing for over a decade and it paid off—depending on who you believe, Let’s Dance sold somewhere between five and ten million copies, fattening Bowie’s coffers substantially, and exposing his music to a brand new dance-based generation.
With a critical drubbing on the horizon, DB later distanced himself from his own work by claiming “actually, what it was was a good ‘Nile Rodgers album’ and barely a Bowie record at all. A telling factoid is how its author didn’t ever consider playing the ‘filler four’ in concert: the non-hits half comprising Criminal World, Ricochet, Shake It and Without You; the latter an Avalonesque spot of balladeering that was one of Bowie’s occasional attempts to out-Ferry Bryan Ferry.
And yet Let’s Dance wasn’t quite a career killer. More of a career duller. But fair play to an incredible artist that had made an enormous number of great records but hadn’t really found a payday. After talking EMI into forking over an ungodly sum of money, one can imagine the pressure was on to produce a hit, so he did what he thought would produce one. Once you understand that, the music might—just might—sound more palatable.
In fact, it was Modern Love’s honking horns and cacophonous drum sound (courtesy of Chic’s Tony Thompson) that set the template for the mid ’80s “sax and drums and rock ’n’ roll” that would dominate the charts, not to mention Bowie’s own live concerts: its “never wave bye-bye” line cornily highlighted to make the song the staple final encore on his Serious Moonlight shows that year, as well as the subsequent Glass Spider and Sound + Vision tours; the three biggest outings of his career.
Decked out in preppy pastels and a hairdo that was an unappetising concoction of scrambled eggs and a blancmange, the blond and blow-waved DB of ’83 smashed all attendance figures for his huge Serious Moonlight trek, including a trio of hastily-added concerts that, at the time, were the biggest shows ever staged in Britain by a solo act: a record-breaking three nights at what is now the distinctly under-used Milton Keynes Bowl. It was the week I turned 14, and it seemed as if almost everyone from school was looking to bag a seat with something pertaining to a view, either within the grassy amphitheatre or the many free vantage points nearby. Alas, spiting more than my own visage, I sat them out. Literally. In my folks’ back garden we could hear the whole coiffured shebang, though the teenage me was still transfixed by less vanilla music to care. Not with that hair.
Bowie-style was everywhere, though, its echoes reverberating through the charts, fashions and vocal mannerisms of the day. Many saw the period as being an amazing cocktail of clothes, fashion, personality and also, yes, sometimes even chords and lyrics and all that kind of stuff. If Bowie wasn’t releasing lightweight singles, he was inspiring them. From his new EMI label mates Duran Duran and Kajagoogoo to Culture Club, Spandau and those cats from Japan, much of the first half of the 1980s was dominated by the Second British Invasion of swishy, sashaying bands clearly influenced by the more affected elements of the Bowie brand. A tainted love? It was like The Beatles never existed.
How ineffably ironic that by the time I succumbed to the inevitable and started buying David Bowie records, he was in a complete creative cul-de-sac. In Eighties terms, there were just two solo sets that followed Let’s Dance, and both painful evidence of Bowie’s artistic wipe-out: 1984’s tawdry Tonight and 1987’s ironically titled Never Let Me Down. Both of these albums sold middling to poorly.
Tonight was Bowie’s first truly horrible album, a record so goddamned lazy that even the most hardcore, blinders-on fanatics gave up trying to manufacture an argument in its favour soon after its release. The karmic blade twisted exceedingly sharp at the compromised artist, resulting in his EMI America years being a long and painfully dry period. Bowie himself felt trapped with an audience that he could not fathom, much to his dismay.
After those three albums, Bowie can be said to have never truly recovered from the price they extracted from his artistic soul. It’s fair to say a handsome wedge of Bowie’s new ‘unfathomable’ audience in ’83 weren’t averse to a spot of bandwagon-jumping when it suited them (and neatly chiming with the book you have in your hands, a good chunk of them would have stuck it out until 1987 at best).
Looking back, it’s also evident Bowie fans are still largely placed in two camps today: before and after Let’s Dance. Straddling the centre ground and defying categorisation (very Bowie, I know), I finally bought my first Bowie record in the April of ‘84 (a 12” of the peerless Ashes To Ashes, chiefly because all the bands I liked would often namedrop him as their primary influence, and it was my earliest memory of him), but it wasn’t until my mother bought me a trio of old Seventies LPs on my 16th birthday (itself just a couple of weeks before his suave and accomplished set at Live Aid) that I was truly hooked to the Bowie scene. Mum asked me which three albums I preferred, and too green to know much about his classic repertoire, I went for the ones with the most outlandish sleeves: Aladdin Sane, Pin Ups and Diamond Dogs—all budget priced RCA International re-pressings. It’s funny, but this triumvirate of decade-old glam era artefacts seemed from a distant universe. A bit like Bowie then.
Aside from building up my collection of old Bowie vinyl, I needed something else to help me make sense of what it was to be a Bowie fan. In the days before the Internet and smartphones, an assemblage of information was something special. Starzone was indeed something very special. It was the publication that gave me a strong sense of who and what David Bowie was all about.
Founded by David Currie in 1981, Starzone was the first fan magazine I encountered. I was blown away by its depth of Bowie knowledge, dazzling display of style and all round colourific professionalism. Almost three decades later, it’s still the Bowie magazine by which all others are measured, and that includes my own short-lived attempt to produce a similar high quality glossy for the ‘90s, with the less snappy title of Crankin’ Out.
With over a decade of Bowie self-publishing between us, it’s nice to be able to do something for DC as a belated thank you for all he and his dedicated team did for the Bowie community. I was truly digging your zine, David. Fan mags are truly a labour of love, and never more so than when one has to wade through endless officialdom and untangle oneself from the reams and reams of red tape that inevitably comes with a superstar of Bowie’s stature.
Interestingly, our immersions in the world of David Bowie each ended with a book, both times as our respective fanzines were faltering, and both books the control freak aspect of Bowie’s personalities had a slight issue with: me, the BowieStyle coffee table tome with Mark Paytress, he the lightning speed Glass Idol. I say lightning speed as, with admirable gusto, Currie beat Bowie at his own book! Glass Idol documented the first few shows of the Dame’s infamous three-ring circus of 1987, the Glass Spider tour. David B was working with the tour’s resident photographer Denis O’Regan on an official book of the proceedings, until David C’s Glass Idol was published that is. Project cancelled. Bowie a bit unhappy.
Mind you, from throwing chairs at Carlos to fending off rape allegations and fat-shaming Jonathan King, Bowie was frequently unhappy that year. The reception to Glass Spider was muted at best. And Bowie was at his best — or at least happiest — when he was the recipient of lavish praise and uniform critical acclaim. It’s fair to say he rarely received either in ’87, if at all.
For some, Bowie’s stagecraft pretensions just didn’t work this time, and the tour would go down in history as one of rock’s greatest follies. The hair was Bono-bemulleted, the drums loud and monotonous, the suits bright and the band (and dancers, with spoken word sections anyone?) dynamically impotent. On top of it all, the Glass Spider theme and narrative was muddled, hammy and delivered with a monstrous MTV gloss, free of any artistic credibility or conviction. And all under the spinal frame of a giant blow-up spider.
It’s tricky to try and get at where the Thin White Duke’s head was in 1987. As a concept, Glass Spider was contrived and calculated to remind people that this was by the same visionary who’d done Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars and Diamond Dogs, not the same artist who sold out with Let’s Dance. Alas, even an arch Bowiephile like Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys was unimpressed: a theatrical show in a football stadium was a “contradiction in terms” he said, telling me later on he thought the inflatable arachnoid aesthetics were “a disaster.”
It didn’t exactly help matters that Bowie was touring on the back of an ill-advised affair regarded by many as even worse than Tonight. Never Let Me Down—or Nadir Let Me Down as I like to call it — would become the first new Bowie album I bought on the day of release.
Co-produced by David Richards (Queen, Iggy Pop) and crafted as a set of more arena-friendly guitar rock tunage to complement his forthcoming tour, NLMD seemed to confirm Bowie’s artistic insolvency: any track with a hint of charm or appealing technique was buried in an avalanche of breathtaking overproduction and bombast. And that’s a shame, because there is some merit and inspired singing beneath the ham-fisted lyrics and semi-melodic generic Eighties pop sound.
The second Glass Spider show at Wembley Stadium on June 20 was my first time seeing the great man in the flesh, just six days before I legally became an adult. There were moments I thought thoroughly enjoyable (Time, abseiling from the wings, for instance), but as Mr Tennant alluded to, a lot of the irony and minutiae of a theatrical presentation was lost on 72,000 people. Take the kiss kiss Bang Bang moment for instance: Bowie beckoning a female ‘fan’ up on stage for a dance was a cheeky, slightly sexist parody of Bruce Springsteen’s cheesy video for Dancing In The Dark. Alas, it had many audiences scratching their heads, unsure of what on earth was going on, even if they were witnessing the whole debacle on the huge video screens either side of the stage.
After Glass Spider juddered through 1987 to a miasma of mixed signals and mixed reviews, Bowie took some time off the following year for a re-think that resulted in Tin Machine. But alas, we’re not here to be overly cruel about Bowie’s oft-bashed works. Looking back, the decade would bring stagnation based on a chase for money, but even in the much-derided mush there were flashes of the old Bowie brilliance.
Since the passing of the world’s favourite oddity, everyone has a new favourite, or an old guilty pleasure they don’t feel embarrassed about loving now. There are key pieces such as the majestic if florid Loving The Alien and the moody noir title theme for Julien Temple’s Absolute Beginners movie, which is a romantic love song so soaringly sweet and earnest it probably didn’t didn’t seem right to embrace it wholeheartedly as a mere teenager at the time.
Bringing things full circle, I even grew to have a grudging respect for the fascist disco pablum of Let’s Dance and its follow up, the primal, tugging boxer beat of China Girl, which saw David exhibit some of his most smoking hot vocal pyrotechnics. And that climactic scene with the titular plaything at the end of its headline-grabbing promotional video was even more incendiary—and filmed, incidentally, at the crack of dawn on Sydney’s Long Reef Beach, a short stroll along the surf from where I’ve been writing this.
While there were albums and tours to be enjoyed after the Eighties —and in one or two cases even revered (ola Outside)—there is the pall of his “Phil Collins” years, hanging over them like some Ghost Of Bowie Past, hobbling his feet and extracting their vengeance from whatever artistic strides he genuinely attempted to make. For all of the good to great work he’d done in the years since, the seismic effect of the EMI years cast a huge shadow over his later work. Somehow, the notion that if he just hadn’t made Let’s Dance he might have weathered the 35 years that followed the 1970s in much better artistic health is an unshakable suspicion.
What is unquestionably an incontrovertible fact is that David Bowie is and will always be a legend, whatever that is. And whether he is or not is never going to be an issue. A cultural disruptor like him knew better than most that you create your own reality. This book is David Currie’s reality, a photographic remembrance of a legendary artist at the peak of his crowd pleasing popularity.
More idols than realities? That’s Bowie.
Steve Pafford, Sydney, February 2019
Steve Pafford is a British writer whose acclaimed book BowieStyle (Omnibus Press, 2000), written in collaboration with Mark Paytress, was once displayed on Madonna’s coffee table. His work has featured in a variety of UK, US and Australian publications and media including BBC, Channel Four, CNN, Mojo, Record Collector, the New York Times and The Independent and as well as lifestyle publications F:S, Gay Times, GuySpy, QX and DNA, and the record-breaking exhibition David Bowie Is.
