DAVID BOWIEâS ex-wife has blasted the rock legendâs musical comeback as she revealed the truth about their shocking sexual exploits.
In an astonishing interview, Angie Bowie told how the star almost missed his own WEDDING after getting caught up in a three-in-a-bed romp. (um where was I?)
Angie said: âDavid was big on threesomes with both men and women â the whole nine yards. And I was right in there.â
She also revealed what happened on the morning she claims she caught David and Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger in BED together.
Speaking from her home in a quiet suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, Angie told of the paranoid depths of his drug abuse, his battle with depression and his bisexuality and love of threesomes.
The couple met in the late Sixties and London was swinging.
Angie, 63 â an American citizen born in Cyprus â had moved to the UK to study at Kingston Polytechnic and Bowie was trying to get a record deal to kick off his pop career.
Angie claims that she encouraged him to play with gender and sexuality and create the bizarre stage personas such as Ziggy Stardust, which turned him into one of the worldâs most fascinating stars.
But the couple almost missed their own wedding, in March 1970, after waking up in bed with another woman after a night of sex and partying.
Recalling the threesome, Angie said: âThe night before our wedding it was a mutual friend of ours. We went out for dinner, back to her place and had plenty of lively sex.
âWe had a very late night and didnât go to bed until 3am or 4am.
âThen we woke up late in north London and had to be in Bromley by 10am to get married. We just about got there in time and staggered in.
âWe saw Davidâs mother Peggy and I thought, âOh boy, this is not good.â
âIt was a bullsh*t romance. When he asked me to marry him, he said: âAnd I donât love you, by the way.â
âI watched David f*** everything that moved.
âIn the first six weeks I knew him I met 14 people heâd slept with. He had told me before we married he didnât love me, so of course he was not going to be faithful.
âAs it was the Sixties I suppose they called it free love.â
Angie also spoke about the morning she allegedly caught her husband and Rolling Stones frontman Mick together in the marital bed of their home in Chelsea in 1973.
She said: âThey were not only in bed together, they were naked.
âMy assistant was laughing in the kitchen when I got home. She said, âYou wonât believe this. David and Mick Jagger.â
âI said, âRight then, put the kettle on.â
âI went upstairs and banged on the door and said, âMorning! Ready for breakfast boys?â
âI walked into the bedroom and David was there with all these pillows and duvets on top of him and on the other side of the bed was Mickâs leg sticking out.
âI said: âDid you guys have a good night?â. They were so hung over they could hardly speak. I took pity on them.â
Angie claimed Bowieâs fascination with Mick came from his desire to âseduceâ all his major rock rivals.
She explained: âIn our living room as we watched Top Of The Pops, David was constantly wanting The Rolling Stones to move over to the States.
He decided he would seduce him like he seduced any competition.
âBut I donât think it was a big love affair (with Mick). It was probably more drunken pawing.â
Despite their turbulent relationship, Angie hoped having a baby with Bowie would help lift his depression.
His family has a history of mental health problems â his half-brother Terry killed himself in 1985.
And, not helped by many years taking drugs including cocaine and heroin, Bowie also battled depression.
In May 1971, their son Duncan Haywood Zowie Jones was born.
His parents called him Zowie but he is now a successful, fiercely private film director known simply as Duncan Jones.
Bowieâs dad Haywood had died in August 1969 from pneumonia â just before his track Space Oddity went Top Ten and launched his pop career.
Angie revealed: âHe was so unhappy about losing his dad and I thought having a child would cheer him up.
âBut I havenât seen Zowie since he was 14. He went to boarding school and decided he didnât want to see me any more.
âHeâs grown up now and if he wants to find me he can.â(how many times are you going to say this? To tabloids no less...jfc)
Angie â who herself became a pop culture pin-up and is now a singer and writer â said she was constantly saving her husband from his paranoid haze as he became gripped by drugs.
She recalled: âI was in London and I got a call from David in Los Angeles and he told me he had been kidnapped by a warlock and two witches.
âHe said that on All Saintsâ night he had to inseminate these two witches so they could have the spawn of Satan.
âI got on a flight the next day to clean up another mess. (lolololol)
âHe did escape, but not before the warlock â who was, of course, a drug dealer â had given him a load more Peruvian flake (cocaine) so he could get higher.â
Angie was speaking four decades after a shoot with top snapper Terry OâNeill for The Sun helped turn her into an iconic Seventies rock ânâ roll muse.
She said: âItâs 40 years since The Sun introduced me to the world.
âWe did lots of great stuff with The Sun to promote David, including a series of iconic photos with Terry.â
After the couple divorced in 1980, Angie says she received ÂŁ500,000 from Bowie â paid over ten years.
She believes it was far from enough, claiming she helped mould him into one of the worldâs biggest stars.
Angie claimed: âI ended up getting $750,000 paid over the next ten years â not very much.
âAnd he refused to give me severance pay for managing him for the past decade.
âIt was in tiny instalments â like a child with an allowance â I couldnât even buy a house.
âWhen I broke up with David I didnât recover for six years for him not paying me for managing him. Maybe I never got over it.
âI do not like people drunk or high. I did drugs but it was once we divorced.
âI thought, âIf he thinks heroin and cocaine are so amazing maybe I can understand him if I try it.â But I couldnât understand a thing.â
Music critics are running out of superlatives to praise Bowieâs big chart comeback. His first album in a decade, The Next Day, is released on Monday.
After ten years in which he stepped away from the music business, living a quieter life in New York, it has been one of the most eagerly awaited releases in history.
But Angie blasted: âI listened to the first single (Where Are We Now?) and it was just awful, just diabolical. The second one was worse than that.
âThis is supposed to be the greatest comeback of the century? Itâs boring. I think every release since the first eight albums has been rubbish.â (lol stay mad)
The Oscar-winning actress Tilda Swinton plays the singerâs lover in the music video for second single The Stars (Are Out Tonight).
Many Bowie fans â and Angie â believe the character is based on her and the plot about the bizarre world of fame inspired by their wild relationship in the spotlight.
Angie added: âI watched 30 seconds and couldnât cope with any more. The subject matter is too retrospective.
âI am pleased he got out of his house in New York and recorded an album. But why has he been sitting in his house for ten years anyway?â
Bowie has been married to stunning model wife Iman, 57, for 20 years.
But Angie suspects behind closed doors, the star could still have dark sexual habits.
She claimed: âWhen David and Iman bought the property in New York he worked on it for three years so it looks like one big apartment but is in fact two completely separate condos inside.
âThatâs so David has his privacy.
âWhat was he doing in there for ten years? I know â because a leopard never changes his spots.â
-----------------
TIME: David Bowie: Back to His Mysterious Best
It was the quietest of comebacks. on Jan. 8 at the stroke of midnight, with no warning and without having performed or spoken in public for many years, David Bowie released a song through iTunes. The song, âWhere Are We Now?â is a mournful, tender ballad that name-checks many of the places in Berlin where Bowie hung out in the 1970s, when he was arguably at his most creative. Now 66, Bowieâwho mostly disappeared from public view around 2006, two years after a heart attack and amid rumors that he was terminally illâends the song with a simple expression of gratitude for being alive and not being alone: âAs long as thereâs me,â he sings, âas long as thereâs you.â
Besides also releasing a video for âWhere Are We Now?â that hit the same notes of reminiscence and humility, Bowie said nothing. There was no press conference to announce a world tour. There were no interviews, no marketing campaign, not so much as a tweet. There was just the promise on his website of an album to come in March. On Feb. 26, again with no prior fanfare, he released the thrilling, unsettling video for the more up-tempo second single, âThe Stars (Are Out Tonight),â which pairs Bowie with his female doppelgĂ€nger, the actor Tilda Swinton. A few days later, iTunes unexpectedly began streaming the album, The Next Day, for free before its official release on March 12. The reviews have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Still, Bowie has said nothing in public.
Smart move. With each year that went by with barely a sign of life from Bowieâno concerts, no red-carpet appearances with his wife (the Somali-born model Iman), few paparazzi shots, no movie cameos, no exhibitions of his paintingsâa sense of mystery steadily grew around him. What was he up to? Was that heart attack he suffered backstage in 2004 the first sign of an irreversible decline? Would he ever produce any more music? Day by day, he became ever more unknowable. And by staying silent and invisible, he gradually hauled back the magical sense of distance that made him the strangest and most compelling rock star of the 1970s, someone who taught the likes of Prince and Madonna lessons in how to shift visual and musical styles and keep people surprised, guessing and wanting more.
They were lessons he himself seemed to have forgotten for a long stretchâfor most of the 1980s, all of the 1990s and some of the following decade, in fact. There were too many records lacking good songs, too many middle-of-the-road concerts. (I went to one in London in 1990 that stopped for an intermission!) For Bowie, coming across as all-accessible was a near fatal career shift. This was a rock star who, perhaps more than any other, had hidden behind bizarre, intimidating invented personas. Kids in 1972 may have yearned to know who the bone-thin, made-up, sexually ambiguous Ziggy Stardust character really wasâbut they may not have wanted, deep down, to find out. The yearning to know was pleasure enough.
Bowieâs last recording until now was released in 2003: Reality, an inoffensive rock record free of riveting melodies or mysteries. His new one, The Next Day, is great. It feels unrushed, the work of many years of thought and honing. (Musicians who worked on it, including his longtime producer, Tony Visconti, have said it took two years to make; they reportedly signed nondisclosure agreements to help keep the recording sessions secret.) In his seventh decade, Bowie makes no attempt on The Next Day to seem young; the songs are full of moments of vulnerability and frailty, and theyâre all the more powerful for that. âHere I am, not quite dying,â he almost shouts on the opening and title track.
In spite of the first singleâs gentleness, The Next Day isâas Visconti has saidâfundamentally a rock album. Many of the songs are insistent and occasionally menacing. Messy guitars rip in and out of the bass-led saxophone thump of âDirty Boys.â Thereâs more threat and big bass in âLove Is Lostâ: âItâs the darkest hour, youâre 22, the voice of youth, the hour of dread.â When he first attracted wide notice in 1969, scoring his first British hit with âSpace Oddity,â Bowie instantly appealed to annoyed, alienated kids who felt he somehow understood them. âLove Is Lostâ suggests heâs still speaking to the age group that made him a starâor at least heâs thinking of them.
On âThe Stars (Are Out Tonight),â he revisits a preoccupation from his own youth: fame. In the video, two androgynous modelsâchosen for their uncanny resemblance to Bowieâportray rock stars who move in next door to a staid married couple played by Bowie and Swinton, invading their home, their sleep, their desires and finally their identities. âWe will never be rid of these stars, but I hope they live forever,â sings Bowie, a man who spent his entire youth chasing fame and who played no small part in influencing our fame-obsessed culture. Directed by Floria Sigismondi, the video captures the songâs urgent erotic longing; itâs as brilliantly strange as the landmark promo for Bowieâs 1980 single âAshes to Ashes,â which made a case for music videos as an art form before MTV even went on air.
The man who by then had spent a decade experimenting with various identities grew up plain old David Jones, a middle-class boy from Londonâs suburbs who changed his stage name to Bowie in the mid-1960s because Davy Jones of the Monkees was beginning to find fame. The young Bowie chased stardom, trying whatever might work: R&B, hippie folk, a sped-up voice on a novelty track called âThe Laughing Gnome.â It was Ziggy, the alien messiah rock star and protagonist of the 1972 concept album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, who finally proved to be Bowieâs vehicle to stardom. His first appearance as Ziggy on the BBCâs Top of the Pops weekly music show, singing âStarmanâ from Ziggy Stardust, startled millions of viewers in Britainâit helped that he lovingly put his arm around his (male) guitaristâand succeeded in what the lyrics of âStarmanâ threatened: âHeâd like to come and meet us, but he thinks heâd blow our minds.â
Having deepened the sexual confusion of a generation, Bowie dropped the Ziggy personaâalong with glam rockâand by 1975âČs Young Americans he was crooning what he called plastic soul. By the mid-1970s he had all but morphed into a character heralded on 1976âČs Station to Station: the Thin White Duke, addicted to cocaine, paranoid, skeletal and prone to wondering aloud about the upside to fascism. Living mostly in Los Angeles during this period, he was deeply unhappy, as he later said, and improbably hardworking, producing more than an album a year, on average, through the decade. Possibly heading for an early death from cocaine abuse, Bowie fled L.A. and his home in Switzerland, where he had moved in 1976, for the comparatively ascetic calm of Berlin. There he worked with producer Brian Eno on a trilogy of albumsâthe experimental, sometimes esoteric Low, âHeroesâ and Lodgerâthat many critics consider his creative high point.
Bowieâs prolific output in the 1970s forms the burning heart of his career, both musically and visually. No other rock performer had embraced fashion and theater with such enthusiasm. In a dress-down era of jeans, beards and denim jackets, Bowie as Ziggy went onstage in heels, makeup, boas and avant-garde costumes made for him by young designers like Japanâs Kansai Yamamoto. Bowie was wearing tight woolen bodysuits missing the left arm and the right leg and exposing much of the right butt cheek long before some of his most obvious students (weâre looking at you, Lady Gaga) were born.
Those still surprising ensembles are a key part of the exhibit âDavid Bowie Is,â which opens March 23 at Londonâs Victoria and Albert Museum. (The show has broken the museumâs record for advance ticket sales.) Bowie has given the museum full access to his archive, which includes 75,000 items; along with the outfits and previously unseen photographs, the curators have dug up notebooks with the scribbled lyrics of some of his best songs, including perhaps his finest six minutes on record, the 1977 tale of young lovers meeting next to the Berlin Wall, âHeroes.â
But you hit 1983 in the showâs catalog and something happens: the suits. Starting with the videos for that yearâs album, Letâs Dance, and his Serious Moonlight tour, these outfitsâa kind of neocolonialist take on a zoot suitâmark a public turning away from what we previously knew as the Bowie-esque style (although he had worn some natty suits during his soul stage). Shoulder pads bulge Dynasty-style from the red suit he wore on his hugely profitable, hugely overblown Glass Spider tour in 1987. Itâs hard not to flinch at the sight.
And in those years, it was hard not to flinch at the music. For all of Bowieâs repeated insistence from an early age that he wasnât a good musician or even a musician at allâthat he was really an actorâheâs always risen and fallen on the strength of his songwriting and recordings. Music has been the problem thatâs burdened him since 1980âČs Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), which is widely considered his last great record. Letâs Dance blended the dance-friendly sensibility of producer Nile Rodgers, some of Bowieâs most soaring vocals and searing, bluesy guitar riffs from Stevie Ray Vaughan. Itâs a superfun mainstream rock album and still Bowieâs most commercially successful record. His next two, Tonight (1984) and Never Let Me Down (1987), were the worst of his career: bombastic and confused attempts to satisfy his creative soul but also to take advantage of new opportunities to make a lot of money from stadium rock.
His career never fully recovered, even though moments of brilliance flashed in some of the records that followed. (His soundtrack for the British television series The Buddha of Suburbia, from 1993, is a modest high point.) A nadir was 1997âČs Earthling, which found Bowie, then 50, trying clumsily to appropriate a then au courant form of British dance music called drum ânâ bassâand, in a larger sense, to claw back his hold on youth culture. The same year, Bowie sold the rights to the following 10 yearsâ worth of royalties from most of his songs. The issue of âBowie bondsâ netted him $55 million up front and did his reputation as a countercultural figure no good.
Meanwhile, a contemporary and hero of his was showing that he still knew how it was done. Months after the release of Earthling, Bob Dylan released Time Out of Mind. It was packed full of controlled but anguished songs about the challenges that come with no longer being a young manâsomething Bowie seemed to be struggling with too. In a 1998 interview with the New York Times, Bowie said, âNow his music has such resonance that when I first put his new album on, I thought I should just give up.â It seemed clear what he was thinking, though he left the thought unspoken: Why canât I do that any longer?
Now we know: he can. If thereâs a key to The Next Dayâs triumphâand to every move Bowie has made in public since Jan. 8âitâs his willingness to look back without lapsing into maudlin nostalgia or a rote rehashing of past glories. Many of the songs on the album make direct reference to some of his strongest work from the 1970sâthereâs the drumbeat that opens the Ziggy Stardust album! Thereâs a guitar riff from Lodger!âbut the gazing back feels like a frank reckoning instead of a sign of defeat. Rather miraculously, Bowie has picked up where he left off when he was last genuinely great. This is a record that could have been made in 1981. Itâs so much better to have it late than never.
-------
THE NEXT DAY DELUXE IN AT #1 IN 21 COUNTRIES
"And the next day, And the next"
Further congratulations are due to David Bowie for the continued success of his new album. http://smarturl.it/DBsplash
The Deluxe version of The Next Day has entered the iTunes album chart at #1 in 21 countries around the globe, as you can see from the accompanying graphic.
Thanks again to everybody who has bought the album thus far, both in the digital and physical formats, couldnât do it without your support.
(it didn't come out in N.A. yet so those charts are obviously not available yet)
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I'm in love with this whole album. After many listens, I think Love is Lost is my favourite now (followed by Dirty Boys). Love is Lost is unbelievably good and hits me right in the feels. Ow~~
Love Is Lost (David Bowie)
Itâs the darkest hour, youâre twenty two
The voice of youth, the hour of dread
The darkest hour and your voice is new
Love is lost, lost is love
Your country's new
Your friends are new
Your house and even your eyes are new
Your maid is new and your accent too
But your fear is as old as the world
Say goodbye to the thrills of life
Where love was good, no love was bad
Wave goodbye to the life without pain
Say hello
Youâre a beautiful girl
Say hello to the lunatic men
Tell them your secrets
Theyâre like the grave
Oh, what have you done?
Oh, what have you done?
Love is lost, lost is love
You know so much, itâs making you cry
You refuse to talk but you think like mad
Youâve cut out your soul and the face of thought
Oh, what have you done?
Oh, what have you done?
SOURCE 1
SOURCE 2
SOURCE 3
Angie needs to shut the fuck up. At the same time, I can't help but feel horribly amused at her bitterness. I had to post this for that reason alone --- Now that most of you Bowie stans got to listen to the album a few times (I hope?), what do you think? What're your favs? Also, N.A. people, don't forget to buy the album in a couple of days!!!! I'll have to wait a bit longer for the vinyl but I did preorder the digital copy too. UGH can't wait to hold the record in my hands though hurrrryyyyyy up Amazon!!!
In an astonishing interview, Angie Bowie told how the star almost missed his own WEDDING after getting caught up in a three-in-a-bed romp. (um where was I?)
Angie said: âDavid was big on threesomes with both men and women â the whole nine yards. And I was right in there.â
She also revealed what happened on the morning she claims she caught David and Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger in BED together.
Speaking from her home in a quiet suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, Angie told of the paranoid depths of his drug abuse, his battle with depression and his bisexuality and love of threesomes.
The couple met in the late Sixties and London was swinging.
Angie, 63 â an American citizen born in Cyprus â had moved to the UK to study at Kingston Polytechnic and Bowie was trying to get a record deal to kick off his pop career.
Angie claims that she encouraged him to play with gender and sexuality and create the bizarre stage personas such as Ziggy Stardust, which turned him into one of the worldâs most fascinating stars.
But the couple almost missed their own wedding, in March 1970, after waking up in bed with another woman after a night of sex and partying.
Recalling the threesome, Angie said: âThe night before our wedding it was a mutual friend of ours. We went out for dinner, back to her place and had plenty of lively sex.
âWe had a very late night and didnât go to bed until 3am or 4am.
âThen we woke up late in north London and had to be in Bromley by 10am to get married. We just about got there in time and staggered in.
âWe saw Davidâs mother Peggy and I thought, âOh boy, this is not good.â
âIt was a bullsh*t romance. When he asked me to marry him, he said: âAnd I donât love you, by the way.â
âI watched David f*** everything that moved.
âIn the first six weeks I knew him I met 14 people heâd slept with. He had told me before we married he didnât love me, so of course he was not going to be faithful.
âAs it was the Sixties I suppose they called it free love.â
Angie also spoke about the morning she allegedly caught her husband and Rolling Stones frontman Mick together in the marital bed of their home in Chelsea in 1973.
She said: âThey were not only in bed together, they were naked.
âMy assistant was laughing in the kitchen when I got home. She said, âYou wonât believe this. David and Mick Jagger.â
âI said, âRight then, put the kettle on.â
âI went upstairs and banged on the door and said, âMorning! Ready for breakfast boys?â
âI walked into the bedroom and David was there with all these pillows and duvets on top of him and on the other side of the bed was Mickâs leg sticking out.
âI said: âDid you guys have a good night?â. They were so hung over they could hardly speak. I took pity on them.â
Angie claimed Bowieâs fascination with Mick came from his desire to âseduceâ all his major rock rivals.
She explained: âIn our living room as we watched Top Of The Pops, David was constantly wanting The Rolling Stones to move over to the States.
He decided he would seduce him like he seduced any competition.
âBut I donât think it was a big love affair (with Mick). It was probably more drunken pawing.â
Despite their turbulent relationship, Angie hoped having a baby with Bowie would help lift his depression.
His family has a history of mental health problems â his half-brother Terry killed himself in 1985.
And, not helped by many years taking drugs including cocaine and heroin, Bowie also battled depression.
In May 1971, their son Duncan Haywood Zowie Jones was born.
His parents called him Zowie but he is now a successful, fiercely private film director known simply as Duncan Jones.
Bowieâs dad Haywood had died in August 1969 from pneumonia â just before his track Space Oddity went Top Ten and launched his pop career.
Angie revealed: âHe was so unhappy about losing his dad and I thought having a child would cheer him up.
âBut I havenât seen Zowie since he was 14. He went to boarding school and decided he didnât want to see me any more.
âHeâs grown up now and if he wants to find me he can.â(how many times are you going to say this? To tabloids no less...jfc)
Angie â who herself became a pop culture pin-up and is now a singer and writer â said she was constantly saving her husband from his paranoid haze as he became gripped by drugs.
She recalled: âI was in London and I got a call from David in Los Angeles and he told me he had been kidnapped by a warlock and two witches.
âHe said that on All Saintsâ night he had to inseminate these two witches so they could have the spawn of Satan.
âI got on a flight the next day to clean up another mess. (lolololol)
âHe did escape, but not before the warlock â who was, of course, a drug dealer â had given him a load more Peruvian flake (cocaine) so he could get higher.â
Angie was speaking four decades after a shoot with top snapper Terry OâNeill for The Sun helped turn her into an iconic Seventies rock ânâ roll muse.
She said: âItâs 40 years since The Sun introduced me to the world.
âWe did lots of great stuff with The Sun to promote David, including a series of iconic photos with Terry.â
After the couple divorced in 1980, Angie says she received ÂŁ500,000 from Bowie â paid over ten years.
She believes it was far from enough, claiming she helped mould him into one of the worldâs biggest stars.
Angie claimed: âI ended up getting $750,000 paid over the next ten years â not very much.
âAnd he refused to give me severance pay for managing him for the past decade.
âIt was in tiny instalments â like a child with an allowance â I couldnât even buy a house.
âWhen I broke up with David I didnât recover for six years for him not paying me for managing him. Maybe I never got over it.
âI do not like people drunk or high. I did drugs but it was once we divorced.
âI thought, âIf he thinks heroin and cocaine are so amazing maybe I can understand him if I try it.â But I couldnât understand a thing.â
Music critics are running out of superlatives to praise Bowieâs big chart comeback. His first album in a decade, The Next Day, is released on Monday.
After ten years in which he stepped away from the music business, living a quieter life in New York, it has been one of the most eagerly awaited releases in history.
But Angie blasted: âI listened to the first single (Where Are We Now?) and it was just awful, just diabolical. The second one was worse than that.
âThis is supposed to be the greatest comeback of the century? Itâs boring. I think every release since the first eight albums has been rubbish.â (lol stay mad)
The Oscar-winning actress Tilda Swinton plays the singerâs lover in the music video for second single The Stars (Are Out Tonight).
Many Bowie fans â and Angie â believe the character is based on her and the plot about the bizarre world of fame inspired by their wild relationship in the spotlight.
Angie added: âI watched 30 seconds and couldnât cope with any more. The subject matter is too retrospective.
âI am pleased he got out of his house in New York and recorded an album. But why has he been sitting in his house for ten years anyway?â
Bowie has been married to stunning model wife Iman, 57, for 20 years.
But Angie suspects behind closed doors, the star could still have dark sexual habits.
She claimed: âWhen David and Iman bought the property in New York he worked on it for three years so it looks like one big apartment but is in fact two completely separate condos inside.
âThatâs so David has his privacy.
âWhat was he doing in there for ten years? I know â because a leopard never changes his spots.â
-----------------
TIME: David Bowie: Back to His Mysterious Best
It was the quietest of comebacks. on Jan. 8 at the stroke of midnight, with no warning and without having performed or spoken in public for many years, David Bowie released a song through iTunes. The song, âWhere Are We Now?â is a mournful, tender ballad that name-checks many of the places in Berlin where Bowie hung out in the 1970s, when he was arguably at his most creative. Now 66, Bowieâwho mostly disappeared from public view around 2006, two years after a heart attack and amid rumors that he was terminally illâends the song with a simple expression of gratitude for being alive and not being alone: âAs long as thereâs me,â he sings, âas long as thereâs you.â
Besides also releasing a video for âWhere Are We Now?â that hit the same notes of reminiscence and humility, Bowie said nothing. There was no press conference to announce a world tour. There were no interviews, no marketing campaign, not so much as a tweet. There was just the promise on his website of an album to come in March. On Feb. 26, again with no prior fanfare, he released the thrilling, unsettling video for the more up-tempo second single, âThe Stars (Are Out Tonight),â which pairs Bowie with his female doppelgĂ€nger, the actor Tilda Swinton. A few days later, iTunes unexpectedly began streaming the album, The Next Day, for free before its official release on March 12. The reviews have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Still, Bowie has said nothing in public.
Smart move. With each year that went by with barely a sign of life from Bowieâno concerts, no red-carpet appearances with his wife (the Somali-born model Iman), few paparazzi shots, no movie cameos, no exhibitions of his paintingsâa sense of mystery steadily grew around him. What was he up to? Was that heart attack he suffered backstage in 2004 the first sign of an irreversible decline? Would he ever produce any more music? Day by day, he became ever more unknowable. And by staying silent and invisible, he gradually hauled back the magical sense of distance that made him the strangest and most compelling rock star of the 1970s, someone who taught the likes of Prince and Madonna lessons in how to shift visual and musical styles and keep people surprised, guessing and wanting more.
They were lessons he himself seemed to have forgotten for a long stretchâfor most of the 1980s, all of the 1990s and some of the following decade, in fact. There were too many records lacking good songs, too many middle-of-the-road concerts. (I went to one in London in 1990 that stopped for an intermission!) For Bowie, coming across as all-accessible was a near fatal career shift. This was a rock star who, perhaps more than any other, had hidden behind bizarre, intimidating invented personas. Kids in 1972 may have yearned to know who the bone-thin, made-up, sexually ambiguous Ziggy Stardust character really wasâbut they may not have wanted, deep down, to find out. The yearning to know was pleasure enough.
Bowieâs last recording until now was released in 2003: Reality, an inoffensive rock record free of riveting melodies or mysteries. His new one, The Next Day, is great. It feels unrushed, the work of many years of thought and honing. (Musicians who worked on it, including his longtime producer, Tony Visconti, have said it took two years to make; they reportedly signed nondisclosure agreements to help keep the recording sessions secret.) In his seventh decade, Bowie makes no attempt on The Next Day to seem young; the songs are full of moments of vulnerability and frailty, and theyâre all the more powerful for that. âHere I am, not quite dying,â he almost shouts on the opening and title track.
In spite of the first singleâs gentleness, The Next Day isâas Visconti has saidâfundamentally a rock album. Many of the songs are insistent and occasionally menacing. Messy guitars rip in and out of the bass-led saxophone thump of âDirty Boys.â Thereâs more threat and big bass in âLove Is Lostâ: âItâs the darkest hour, youâre 22, the voice of youth, the hour of dread.â When he first attracted wide notice in 1969, scoring his first British hit with âSpace Oddity,â Bowie instantly appealed to annoyed, alienated kids who felt he somehow understood them. âLove Is Lostâ suggests heâs still speaking to the age group that made him a starâor at least heâs thinking of them.
On âThe Stars (Are Out Tonight),â he revisits a preoccupation from his own youth: fame. In the video, two androgynous modelsâchosen for their uncanny resemblance to Bowieâportray rock stars who move in next door to a staid married couple played by Bowie and Swinton, invading their home, their sleep, their desires and finally their identities. âWe will never be rid of these stars, but I hope they live forever,â sings Bowie, a man who spent his entire youth chasing fame and who played no small part in influencing our fame-obsessed culture. Directed by Floria Sigismondi, the video captures the songâs urgent erotic longing; itâs as brilliantly strange as the landmark promo for Bowieâs 1980 single âAshes to Ashes,â which made a case for music videos as an art form before MTV even went on air.
The man who by then had spent a decade experimenting with various identities grew up plain old David Jones, a middle-class boy from Londonâs suburbs who changed his stage name to Bowie in the mid-1960s because Davy Jones of the Monkees was beginning to find fame. The young Bowie chased stardom, trying whatever might work: R&B, hippie folk, a sped-up voice on a novelty track called âThe Laughing Gnome.â It was Ziggy, the alien messiah rock star and protagonist of the 1972 concept album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, who finally proved to be Bowieâs vehicle to stardom. His first appearance as Ziggy on the BBCâs Top of the Pops weekly music show, singing âStarmanâ from Ziggy Stardust, startled millions of viewers in Britainâit helped that he lovingly put his arm around his (male) guitaristâand succeeded in what the lyrics of âStarmanâ threatened: âHeâd like to come and meet us, but he thinks heâd blow our minds.â
Having deepened the sexual confusion of a generation, Bowie dropped the Ziggy personaâalong with glam rockâand by 1975âČs Young Americans he was crooning what he called plastic soul. By the mid-1970s he had all but morphed into a character heralded on 1976âČs Station to Station: the Thin White Duke, addicted to cocaine, paranoid, skeletal and prone to wondering aloud about the upside to fascism. Living mostly in Los Angeles during this period, he was deeply unhappy, as he later said, and improbably hardworking, producing more than an album a year, on average, through the decade. Possibly heading for an early death from cocaine abuse, Bowie fled L.A. and his home in Switzerland, where he had moved in 1976, for the comparatively ascetic calm of Berlin. There he worked with producer Brian Eno on a trilogy of albumsâthe experimental, sometimes esoteric Low, âHeroesâ and Lodgerâthat many critics consider his creative high point.
Bowieâs prolific output in the 1970s forms the burning heart of his career, both musically and visually. No other rock performer had embraced fashion and theater with such enthusiasm. In a dress-down era of jeans, beards and denim jackets, Bowie as Ziggy went onstage in heels, makeup, boas and avant-garde costumes made for him by young designers like Japanâs Kansai Yamamoto. Bowie was wearing tight woolen bodysuits missing the left arm and the right leg and exposing much of the right butt cheek long before some of his most obvious students (weâre looking at you, Lady Gaga) were born.
Those still surprising ensembles are a key part of the exhibit âDavid Bowie Is,â which opens March 23 at Londonâs Victoria and Albert Museum. (The show has broken the museumâs record for advance ticket sales.) Bowie has given the museum full access to his archive, which includes 75,000 items; along with the outfits and previously unseen photographs, the curators have dug up notebooks with the scribbled lyrics of some of his best songs, including perhaps his finest six minutes on record, the 1977 tale of young lovers meeting next to the Berlin Wall, âHeroes.â
But you hit 1983 in the showâs catalog and something happens: the suits. Starting with the videos for that yearâs album, Letâs Dance, and his Serious Moonlight tour, these outfitsâa kind of neocolonialist take on a zoot suitâmark a public turning away from what we previously knew as the Bowie-esque style (although he had worn some natty suits during his soul stage). Shoulder pads bulge Dynasty-style from the red suit he wore on his hugely profitable, hugely overblown Glass Spider tour in 1987. Itâs hard not to flinch at the sight.
And in those years, it was hard not to flinch at the music. For all of Bowieâs repeated insistence from an early age that he wasnât a good musician or even a musician at allâthat he was really an actorâheâs always risen and fallen on the strength of his songwriting and recordings. Music has been the problem thatâs burdened him since 1980âČs Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), which is widely considered his last great record. Letâs Dance blended the dance-friendly sensibility of producer Nile Rodgers, some of Bowieâs most soaring vocals and searing, bluesy guitar riffs from Stevie Ray Vaughan. Itâs a superfun mainstream rock album and still Bowieâs most commercially successful record. His next two, Tonight (1984) and Never Let Me Down (1987), were the worst of his career: bombastic and confused attempts to satisfy his creative soul but also to take advantage of new opportunities to make a lot of money from stadium rock.
His career never fully recovered, even though moments of brilliance flashed in some of the records that followed. (His soundtrack for the British television series The Buddha of Suburbia, from 1993, is a modest high point.) A nadir was 1997âČs Earthling, which found Bowie, then 50, trying clumsily to appropriate a then au courant form of British dance music called drum ânâ bassâand, in a larger sense, to claw back his hold on youth culture. The same year, Bowie sold the rights to the following 10 yearsâ worth of royalties from most of his songs. The issue of âBowie bondsâ netted him $55 million up front and did his reputation as a countercultural figure no good.
Meanwhile, a contemporary and hero of his was showing that he still knew how it was done. Months after the release of Earthling, Bob Dylan released Time Out of Mind. It was packed full of controlled but anguished songs about the challenges that come with no longer being a young manâsomething Bowie seemed to be struggling with too. In a 1998 interview with the New York Times, Bowie said, âNow his music has such resonance that when I first put his new album on, I thought I should just give up.â It seemed clear what he was thinking, though he left the thought unspoken: Why canât I do that any longer?
Now we know: he can. If thereâs a key to The Next Dayâs triumphâand to every move Bowie has made in public since Jan. 8âitâs his willingness to look back without lapsing into maudlin nostalgia or a rote rehashing of past glories. Many of the songs on the album make direct reference to some of his strongest work from the 1970sâthereâs the drumbeat that opens the Ziggy Stardust album! Thereâs a guitar riff from Lodger!âbut the gazing back feels like a frank reckoning instead of a sign of defeat. Rather miraculously, Bowie has picked up where he left off when he was last genuinely great. This is a record that could have been made in 1981. Itâs so much better to have it late than never.
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THE NEXT DAY DELUXE IN AT #1 IN 21 COUNTRIES
"And the next day, And the next"
Further congratulations are due to David Bowie for the continued success of his new album. http://smarturl.it/DBsplash
The Deluxe version of The Next Day has entered the iTunes album chart at #1 in 21 countries around the globe, as you can see from the accompanying graphic.
Thanks again to everybody who has bought the album thus far, both in the digital and physical formats, couldnât do it without your support.
(it didn't come out in N.A. yet so those charts are obviously not available yet)
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I'm in love with this whole album. After many listens, I think Love is Lost is my favourite now (followed by Dirty Boys). Love is Lost is unbelievably good and hits me right in the feels. Ow~~
Love Is Lost (David Bowie)
Itâs the darkest hour, youâre twenty two
The voice of youth, the hour of dread
The darkest hour and your voice is new
Love is lost, lost is love
Your country's new
Your friends are new
Your house and even your eyes are new
Your maid is new and your accent too
But your fear is as old as the world
Say goodbye to the thrills of life
Where love was good, no love was bad
Wave goodbye to the life without pain
Say hello
Youâre a beautiful girl
Say hello to the lunatic men
Tell them your secrets
Theyâre like the grave
Oh, what have you done?
Oh, what have you done?
Love is lost, lost is love
You know so much, itâs making you cry
You refuse to talk but you think like mad
Youâve cut out your soul and the face of thought
Oh, what have you done?
Oh, what have you done?
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Angie needs to shut the fuck up. At the same time, I can't help but feel horribly amused at her bitterness. I had to post this for that reason alone --- Now that most of you Bowie stans got to listen to the album a few times (I hope?), what do you think? What're your favs? Also, N.A. people, don't forget to buy the album in a couple of days!!!! I'll have to wait a bit longer for the vinyl but I did preorder the digital copy too. UGH can't wait to hold the record in my hands though hurrrryyyyyy up Amazon!!!