David Bowie is 65 and it's been a strange journey. I didn't discover his work until I was in sixth form, when my teenage love of Suede, Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails led back to Iggy Pop, Velvet Underground and David Bowie...I was in an interesting position. Not old enough to remember the great rise of the Glam rock God of Ziggy, the dizzy commercial heights of 'Let's Dance' or the derision prompted by the mid-80s and Tin Machine, all I knew was that he once played something called Ziggy Stardust and there was a Hitchcock-esque video for 1993's, 'Jump They Say' that once came on ITV's Chart Show and engaged me for four-and-a-half-minutes before I went on my merry way.
So, after 60 years, a fascinating bundle of contradictions: a guy with a Third Reich-obessed, occultist alter-ego who gives dodgy salutes from the back of open-top Daimlers, but who also writes anti-fascist tirades and has one of the most ethnically-diverse bands in rock; a bi-sexual in a 20-year monogamous marriage to a woman almost his own age (by rock standards, that's startling...although she is a former model, so yet another layer of confusion); a guy who made a bundle on the stadium circuit and tried to vanish into a band to escape it all; someone with a huge ambition to live in LA, who then fled to Berlin to get away from it; man who claims to have never been a lefty (and looked every inch like the uber-yuppie in the 80s) but who also refused a knighthood, credited his drummer with writing songs to get the man a royalty and released a pro-Tibet single in China during the Hong Kong handover with a Mandarin translation, no less - a more exciting event than a hundred Band Aids, with its creepy racist lyrics.
So, happy birthday to the Dame (who, without fanfare, vanished from the world stage with no signs he'll ever return to it) and here's my favourites of your albums:
Low (1977)
It's actually very funny at the start - an eccentric collection of fragmented pop songs that sound as if they've been built out of samples of Wire, O-Jays, Kraftwerk and early Pink Floyd (well, his real initials are DJ after all). Then after these quirky, audaciously brief shorts that vacillate between ironic and heartfelt rumination on isolation, bewilderment and loneliness, Bowie all but vanishes (bar some haunting wailing) for a collection of synth symphonies far more reminiscent of Steve Reich or Philip Glass than anything in rock. And if we want a tenuous 'Doctor Who' link, they occasionally sound like the kind of Radiophonic experiments that the show managed to offer up too.
Station to Station (1976)
It's funky but in place of the warmth synonymous with so much contemporaneous soul music, it's a chilly affair. At times, the ramblings of a cocaine-smashed ego maniac with a Kabbala fixation, it's the heartfelt cries for love, spiritual healing and the company of people rather than yes-men that make it such a fascinating and beautiful affair.
"Heroes" (1977)
Unlike 'Low', this WAS actually recorded in Berlin and the city permeates the album. On the first half, the Weimar-era decadence familiar to readers of Isherwood infuses quirky, uncompromising disco-y rock numbers such as 'Beauty and the Beast' and 'BlackOut', while the sublime title track and the haunting 'Sons of the Silent Age' are gorgeous slow burners. On the second half, it's as if words can no longer express the view from Hansa by the Wall studios and the instrumentals provide attitudes and atmospheres that are evocative of the doom that once pervaded the cultural cross roads of Europe...Even listening to it now when travelling through the city (as I did a couple of years ago), it makes huge amounts of aesthetic sense.
I've also had many a wonderful listening experience with the too-long but underrated 'Outside', plus 'Diamond Dogs', 'Hunky Dory' and 'Lodger'. However, not having been there for the pop cultural phenomenon that was 'Ziggy Stardust', it's sometimes hard to gauge why it has been so lasting. It's full of great hooks and melodies certainly, but 'Aladdin Sane' manages to give Ziggy a sonic landscape to match the look, whereas 'Ziggy' - to me - just sounds like T-Rex with The Velvet's swagger that could have done with beefier production...So, what am I missing here?
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