INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Musician JULY 1990 - by Timothy White

TURN AND FACE THE STRANGE

David Bowie looks back

They were nights to remember. David Bowie, rock's Dada Garbo, fresh from the breakthrough success of his Hunky Dory album, had booked his notorious new stage pageant for two shows - August 19, 20, 1972 - at London's Rainbow Theatre. Both were instant sell-outs. Bowie warned untutored audiences of the coming transformation of most rock into calculated drama: "There are going to be a lot of tragedies, and a lot of clangers dropped over the next few years, when a lot of bands try to become theatrical without knowing their craft."

The former David Robert Jones had slowly risen from failed model, post-Beatles popster, student mime, pitchman for Lyons Maid's "Luv" ice cream and part-time radio/film actor into Britain's hottest rock harlequin. His current artistic outlook was coolly pragmatic: "I wish myself to be a prop, if anything, for my own songs."

The opening night's concert featured a set by Roxy Music, and then the stage was cleared for the main event. Bowie appeared abruptly from out of the shadows, a mascaraed android, his formerly blond hair bristling scarlet. Striding across a carpet of dry-ice smoke, he sang Lady Stardust as the projected face of Marc Bolan shone on a large screen beside him.

"Hello, I'm Ziggy Stardust and these are the Spiders From Mars."

Spotlights revealed guitarist Mick Ronson, bassist Trevor Bolder and drummer Mick Woodmansey, while Matthew Fisher provided keyboards from backstage. Through a blur of costume changes - each more surreal than the last - the singer leapt from level to level on the tiered and scaffolded scenery. The performance was bizarre, building to a finale in which Bowie joined mime Lindsay Kemp and the Astronettes dance troupe in a sinister burst of choreography.

Rapt in their choice seats were Elton John, Mick Jagger, Alice Cooper and Lou Reed, the last quoted in the press describing the program as "amazing, stupendous, incredible - the greatest thing I've ever seen." Over the next twenty years, the Ziggy tour and the album it heralded would emerge as two of rock's most ominous and widely emulated watersheds.

Like so much of David Bowie's finest work, The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars seemed to stop the psychic clock of its era and restart it at the stroke of midnight. Appearing during a season of depravity in which George Wallace was shot, Nixon's Watergate burglars were exposed, and terrorists murdered eleven athletes at the Munich Olympics, Ziggy was an intuitive indictment of a civilization drunk on its vanity, devouring its conscience. As with all sightings of the truth, no one who's ever experienced the record will ever forget it.

This summer, Bowie fans have an opportunity to enjoy the album as never before, as Rykodisc issues it on CD along with five bonus tracks and copious liner notes. And Bowie and his latest band (guitarist Adrian Belew, drummer Mike Hodges, keyboardist Rick Fox and bassist Erdal Kizilcay) are playing recast versions of Ziggy classics on David's retrospective Sound + Vision World Tour 1990, which he threatens will be the last live hurrah for his past repertoire. After a year in which a fully updated Changes bowie greatest hits (including a Fame '90 remix) joins most of Bowie's rarities- enhanced catalog in the CD racks, David vows to unveil a second Tin Machine album and then focus only on the future.

Only a pushover would presume David Bowie, now forty-three, is showing all his cards, yet there's sound commercial and musical wisdom in his promises. And if his word is good, then his long-confounded public deserves a candid recap of all that's gone before. The man now concedes that obscure pop act Ronald "Vince" Taylor & The Playboys was the initial spark for the Ziggy concept (Vince scaled the UK Top 15 in 1960 with I'll Be Your Hero/Jet Black Machine), but it seems high time David divulged the full scope of his influences, trials and covert dreams.

This interview took place last January at Magic Ventures Studios, a recording complex in Manhattan's West 20s. The facility was picked because it was within walking distance of the rehearsal space Bowie had just rented for the Sound + Vision troupe. David arrived without fanfare and in fine fettle. His sole requests were for a brewed pot of his favorite brand of Italian coffee and a comfortable chair in which to pass the afternoon.

BOWIE: [Smiling] Ask me the secret of my success.

MUSICIAN: Okay, what is the secret -

BOWIE: - timing!

MUSICIAN: - of your success?

BOWIE: Aha, ha, ha!

MUSICIAN: Very clever You're gonna do well in this business. We're here to discuss your first quarter-century in rock, so let's begin circa 1963. Didn't you quit one of your first bands, The Kon-Rads, because they didn't want to play R&B?

BOWIE: Yes, and I know the exact song! It was Marvin Gaye's Can I Get a Witness. They wouldn't play it!! They said, "We can't do this - we do Shadows numbers and Cliff Richard." I said, "No, no, you're stupid! This music is so exciting." We had a fairly bitter fight about it.

MUSICIAN: What was the very first record you heard that made you want to stick up for R&B?

BOWIE: Screamin' Jay Hawkins' I Put A Spell On You, with Little Demon on the B-side. Another one that made a big impression was the Alan Freed Rock And Roll Band's Right Now, Right Now. I had an allowance of seven shillings and sixpence a week to spend on records, and I would do very little to earn it! [Laughter] I had an incredibly generous father.

He just wanted me to decide what I wanted and stick with it, and he knew that from when I was about nine I wanted to go into music. So he was quite happy I was taking my saxophone lessons. Recalling my sax influences, I tried passionately at that time to believe I liked Eric Dolphy. When in fact I didn't until a few years after that. I'd been forcing myself at first to listen to modern jazz, fighting myself to understand what it was I loved about it, but I really didn't know. I couldn't digest it yet.

MUSICIAN: By 1966, you led Davey Jones & The Lower Third, a would-be R&B band that sounded a lot like The Who.

BOWIE: Oh, we used to support them, and they were a terrific influence on us. Even as The High Numbers, you could tell they were going to be such an influence. They were just the best, a happening band - and we soaked everything up.

MUSICIAN: How'd you come to write the Lower Thirds' first single, Can't Help Thinking About Me? It's a perfect post-adolescent statement, at a stage when you're lucky if you can dress yourself.

BOWIE: Yeah! I'd woken up, my clothes were all over the room - and I was still in them! [Laughter] It was because I was a kid, and that's what you write about a lot when you're that age. I was nineteen; that was a nineteen-year-old's kind of song.

I went from the King Bees to the Lower Third, with the Mannish Boys somewhere in between. Then the Buzz. Who the hell was in the Buzz? The Buzz might have been just remnants of the Lower Third. Then we had Hype, which was a particular favorite of mine. Hype became The Spiders without Tony Visconti on bass, 'cause Trevor Bolder came in as bassist. Hype was really the embryonic Spiders.

MUSICIAN: But you also had an interim stint as a folksinger: Conversation Piece, a 1970 B-side that's now a bonus track on the new Space Oddity reissue, has the defeated line, "I can't see the road for the rain in my eyes."

BOWIE: That's very weird that you should bring up that line. I just realized that in one of the lyrics for the new Tin Machine album I put in the line, "There's a speck of dust in my eye / But it doesn't matter / I've seen everything anyway." I think the difference in attitude is rather interesting. [Laughter]

I'd gone through two or three bands and not been happy with what I was doing. I'd been working very much in mixed-media things around London, and I found myself just basically with a guitar. To get any kind of an audience then, the folk thing seemed to be the area to go. I didn't do much in that area, because I didn't feel I was very good at it. But I did try it for a bit, and I guess that's how those kinds of things got written.

MUSICIAN: There's another moving line in the same song where you say you feel like you're "invisible" and might not be recalled.

BOWIE: I felt very ephemeral. I didn't feel substantial. I didn't feel a particular sense of self. It seemed that I had to extract pieces from around me and put them onto myself to create a person.

I was having a real problem. I felt invisible, but not in that malicious fashion where I could watch everybody else and write it down. I just felt invisible.

MUSICIAN: A lovely 1969 folk song on the Sound + Vision collection, Wild-Eyed Boy From Freecloud, has a similar melancholy quality.

BOWIE: That had a very strong narrative underpinning the thing, which worked very well. It's one of my favorite songs of the period. It was about the disassociated, the ones who feel as though they're left outside, which was how I felt about me. I always felt I was on the edge of events, the fringe of things, and left out. A lot of my characters in those early years seem to revolve around that one feeling. It must have come from my own interior puzzlement at where I was.

MUSICIAN: London Bye Ta-Ta, a 1970 bonus track on Sound + Vision, now sounds like it could be the new single by The Cure.

BOWIE: I wonder if The Cure have about the same expertise on guitar that I had [laughter] when I was writing it. It has the kind of chords that you use when you know about seven good ones. You've got E, A and B, but then you learn F-sharp minor, and that's the magic chord, because ou can develop amazing little patterns if you've got an F-sharp minor under your belt.

That song evokes the voguish attitudes of the era, the style-making consciousness, which has got a lot to do with being English. There's something about the English: They don't want to be seen to be normal or average. There's a desperation to getting away from being middle-of-the-road or being taken as representative of the next guy. An English kid will always describe somebody else by the clothes they wear. Not like, "Oh, he's a great guy," but rather, "Aw, he's the kind of guy who wears corduroys - you know?" That's always fascinated me. There's a strong streak of dandyism among the English. It stems from far-fetched illusions of once having an Empire. These are the apocalyptic leftovers of having lost everything: "Ah, but we still got our clothes!"

MUSICIAN: Even when you've dealt in social commentary, as with Bombers on the Ryko Hunky Dory reissue, the view is similar to Starman or Space Oddity, where you took a topical social dilemma and personalized it. In this case you explored how the man in the plane feels about dropping the bombs.

BOWIE: I just wanted to be that person myself to see how it felt! But I never ever thought my songs would help anybody think or know anything. Yet it did seem that at that time there were an awful lot of people who were feeling a similar way. They were starting to feel alienated from society, especially the breakdown of the family as we'd known it in the '40s, '50s and especially the '60s, when it really started crumbling. Then, in the '70s, people in my age group were disinclined to be a part of society. It was really hard to convince oneself that you were part of society.

MUSICIAN: That was one of the concepts Hunky Dory's Changes encapsulated in 1972. You seemed to be saying that the idea of doing your own thing might be worthwhile, but it seemed illogical to expect society to completely accommodate it.

BOWIE: Yeah! It's like: Okay, you've broken up the family unit, and you say you're trying to get outta your mind and expand yourself and all that. Fine. So now that you've left us, what are we left with? 'Cause here we are, without our families, totally out of our heads, and we don't know where on earth we are. That was the feeling of the early '70s - nobody knew where they were.

MUSICIAN: Changes also had a great phrase that'd make a good title for your memoirs: "Turn and face the strange."

BOWIE: That was a line obviously left over from the Jim Morrison/Syd Barrett school of writing. Barrett was a huge influence on me, absolutely. I thought Syd could do no wrong. I thought he was a massive talent. He was the first I had ever seen in the middle '60s who could decorate a stage. He had this strange mystical look to him, with painted black fingernails and his eyes fully made up. He weaved around the microphone, and I thought, "This guy is totally entrancing!" He was like some figure out of an Indonesian play or something, and wasn't altogether of this world. It was so demanding, and I thought it was magical. It's so sad that he couldn't continue with the fervour he started with.

MUSICIAN: A lot of people may not realize that you recorded much of The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars before you did Hunky Dory.

BOWIE: [Nodding] A lot of it. I wanted to take my time over it, so Hunky Dory was an interim project to get me through the recording contract - which meant that I had to have an album out. So I did Hunky Dory - and there were some great songs on Hunky Dory - but I did about half the Ziggy album before it.

MUSICIAN: Before you gave them that name, weren't The Spiders known as The Bats?

BOWIE: Yes, they were! They were a band from the north of England, from a place called Hull. It was Mick Ronson, John Cambridge and Trevor Bolder. Tony Visconti brought Mick in to work on Hunky Dory. And Ronson said, "I've got these great guys up in Yorkshire that would be just great for playing with you." I said, "Let's bring them down!" The whole idea of the album came first, and the Rats became the Spiders to accommodate the album.

MUSICIAN: Prior to Ziggy, no one in rock had looked at careerism in such a brutal way. What would have engendered your harsh unsentimentality about the star-making process - even as you were ascending in it?

BOWIE: I think it was the idea of fabrication and how it had snowballed in popular culture. Realism, honesty and all these things that came out of the late '60s had gotten really boring to many jaded people going into the early '70s. I think the band only half-understood what I meant, but I thought it would be such great fun to fabricate something so totally unearthly and unreal, and have it living as an icon. So the story of Ziggy came out of that thinking, really. Even though it was a fabrication, I think any writer imbues his writing with a sense of himself and how he feels about himself at the time. So I think a lot of it came out of my own problems with myself. Going back again to that feeling of being invisible, it was a way of creating myself. I thought, "Let's make him from the floor upwards!"

MUSICIAN: Suffragette City and Rock 'n' Roll Suicide were two of the last tracks recorded for the album.

BOWIE: Yes, and at that point I had a passion for the idea of the rock star as meteor. And it was the whole idea of The Who's line, "Hope I die before I get old," which was very potent.

At that youthful age you cannot believe that you'll lose the ability to be this enthusiastic and this all-knowing about the world, life and experience - which you supposedly are when you're in your early twenties. You think you've probably discovered all the secrets to life, or you're at least half the way to discovering them. So Rock 'n' Roll Suicide was a declaration of the end of the effect of being young.

With Suffragette City, I was interested in the idea of the feminist movement, the beginnings and seeds of that. I was kinda sour in there, but only lightly.

MUSICIAN: Do you remember the day that Sue Fussey, the hairdresser, dyed your hair and gave you the Ziggy cut?

BOWIE: Very well! It went through a number of colors. I know that green was one of the colors that we tried, but red was the one we stuck with. If I remember rightly, that came from the fact that London was all agog over a new young Japanese designer called Kansai Yamamoto. He'd just unleashed all these Kabuki- and Noh-inspired clothes on London, and one of his models had the Kabuki lion's mane on her head, this bright red thing. I said to Sue, "That's just so great! Let's go red." She said, "Oh, sorta like ginger-colored?" And I said, "No! Red!! So it's all Kansai's fault.

MUSICIAN: Did you hit the street with that haircut immediately?

BOWIE: [Smiling] After much deliberation, yeah. I walked through an area called Tottenham Court Road, which was known as the Tin Pan Alley of London. But the haircut didn't get the kind of response on the street that you'd imagine, because there were quite a few eccentrics - in one way or another - in London at the time. It was only when this eccentric person went up onstage and started singing that it started having a riveting effect.

And I got in touch with Kansai, and he made all the original clothes for us for all the early Spider shows. I still have every single one of those outfits, and they're museum pieces, because they're all one-offs, you know. [Laughing] He really couldn't sell them back then for love or money, so it was great having me wear them.

MUSICIAN: You were one of the first people to have dress-a-likes come to your concerts in droves.

BOWIE: That was an extraordinary phenomenon. It really was. Especially at the Rainbow concerts.

MUSICIAN: Where Lindsay Kemp was hanging from the rafters...

BOWIE: ...Dressed as a fairy angel! [Explosive laughter] It was a great show, and the last of our real mixed-media shows, because we were using film footage, scaffolding, three or four levels of performance, the Lindsay Kemp Mime Company, and pre-recorded tapes for the equivalent of sampling these ever-repeated phrases.

MUSICIAN: There are several outrageous bonus tracks from that era on the new Ziggy Stardust reissue.

BOWIE: There's one called Sweet Head which didn't get on the original album. It was about oral sex, and it was one that I don't think RCA particularly wanted. These days, it's probably just as bad, and I'll get stickered on it!

MUSICIAN: It's amazing that you found time on the zoo-like US Ziggy tour to do a lot of writing for Aladdin Sane. You recorded tracks like The Jean Genie in New York and Nashville. How were you able to squeeze anything in during that chaotic time?

BOWIE: I think when you get caught up in that wave of euphoria that is the original response to becoming well-known, you're quite sure it's only going to last for a limited amount of time. So you cram as much work into it as possible - in case you lose your place in the queue. You feel, "While I've got the chance, I better just write and write and write!" Twenty-four hours a day, I was writing and working up ideas for future shows - before it all suddenly disappeared. The gestation for Jean Genie was about a day; that's all it took to put it together. I'd just met Iggy Pop. He was this character out of Detroit, and I was trying to verbalize him in some way. I wanted to respond to the kind of image I had of him - which changed as I got to know him - but that's where that song came from. And the title's play on words was from Jean Genet.

MUSICIAN: Another Aladdin track with a Detroit background was Panic In Detroit, which you performed in concert in a boxing ring.

BOWIE: How the initial song was written was that there were snipers all over America on tops of buildings, shooting at everybody. That was part of life's rich pattern at the time. [Laughter] I don't know why I did it live with boxing gloves. I guess if you've got ten thousand people in front of you, you've gotta hit 'em with something. Maybe I was the sniper - but maybe I was the victim. The ropes of the ring tied me up at the end of the performance. A lot of it was associative ideas.

I was very much under the influence of William Burroughs' writing techniques, and the idea of discharging all sorts of elements and images into one palette. It seemed such a great way of writing. The idea would be that you'd take three different subject matters, cut them up and put the pieces together. And out of it you get a fourth subject matter. You might not use verbatim the stuff that comes out, but it certainly triggers off another idea.

For example: If you write one sentence about a table, and one sentence about a blonde, you might get this table with curvy legs out of it. And that could give you an idea for yet another subject you might not have thought of before. It's a good instrument for writing.

MUSICIAN: In 1974, after the Diamond Dogs tour, you took up temporary residence in Philadelphia, staying at the Barclay Hotel while you began the Young Americans album at Sigma Sound.

BOWIE: I must say, I have very good feelings about Philadelphia. Young Americans was the most social record I ever made, I think, because every day ten or twenty kids would be waiting outside and we'd let them in to help out and give ideas. And at night we'd go to clubs with them. We had a big end-of-record party and they came to that and we played the album mixes. It was really neat.

MUSICIAN: Let's set history straight regarding the post-Philly sessions at New York's Record Plant for Fame. What specifically prompted you, John Lennon and Carlos Alomar to write that song?

BOWIE: My band had been working onstage with an old [1961] single by The Flares called Foot Stompin'. The riff that Carlos had developed for it I found fascinating. I kept telling him that it was a waste to do it on somebody else's song, and that we should use that on something of our own. So we were playing that riff for John Lennon in the studio - he came down for the day - and we said, "What do you make of this, John?" He was playing along with it, just muttering to himself in a corner, saying, "- aim! - aim!" It just all fell into place when he said, "- Fame!"

We said, "That's great, John! Hey, John helped us write this song called Fame!!" John carried on playing rhythm guitar and we just put the whole backing-track thing together in about fifteen to twenty minutes. It was a real "Hey-let's-do-the-show-right-here" Mickey Rooney thing. Then I took the idea of fame and just ran away and wrote the lyrics for it. The next day, John came down again and said, "Hey, that's real good, that one!"

MUSICIAN: A lot of people have tried to rip off that groove ever since.

BOWIE: Well, I don't know, but I understand that James Brown took it into a studio and did a single with it within a couple of weeks of hearing the thing. 'Cause you know Carlos used to work with James Brown. I think that's about the only time in my life that I really feel proud of being that influential on somebody else's record.

MUSICIAN: Let's talk about your boyhood education and how it helped direct your later creativity.

BOWIE: What meant more to me than anything else in the world was being told that there was such a thing as art school. In England, after you reach the age of eleven, you take an exam called the Eleven-Plus. If you pass the exam you can decide to go into something terribly academic, something less academic that's more aligned to engineering - or art school.

Newly opened around 1957-58 in our area in Bromley was the first art school for eleven- and twelve-year-olds. It was an experiment in the south of England, and the one who initiated it was a guy called Owen Frampton, Peter Frampton's father. He thought it would be worthwhile that anybody who showed an artistic inclination should be trained from a younger age than the usual sixteen- or seventeen-year-old period.

When that happened, I thought, "I can go to art school at twelve! I won't have to do any math!" It was just so great, I jumped at it. I spent my days there thinking about whether I was gonna be a rock 'n' roll singer or if I was gonna be John Coltrane. And Owen was great. He knew a lot of us were, typically, into music, and probably would never cut it as painters. So he gave us a lot of leeway and was very fair.

MUSICIAN: What painters excited you at the same point rock 'n' roll was becoming important?

BOWIE: As an adolescent, I still thought that Salvador Dali was the be-all and end-all. Van Gogh and Dali were the big ones; I thought those two were the bees' knees.

MUSICIAN: Did you ever write a song with a painter in mind?

BOWIE: I guess the first time I approached that was with Warhol in the song Andy Warhol on Hunky Dory. But that was more about him as a manufacturer of atmospheres rather than a painter per se. I never did a Starry, Starry Night for Van Gogh, or anything like that.

MUSICIAN: You were born in 1947, in a post-world war era, when there was a sense that civilization was going to have to find a new order. Rock 'n' roll was part of a trial-and-error search in which a young generation believed it could make a new way.

BOWIE: In 1947 England was crippled, absolutely crippled. By the time I was eight or nine, we thought we were going to follow the Americans. We just thought that American music was it. It was the Teddy Boys' heyday, during Bill Haley, Elvis Presley and all that.

There was an exuberance there, but I was only a kid, still being told my friends and I were stupid little schoolboys. We had every kind of enthusiasm kicked out of us, frankly. That was one thing that was really bad about the school systems when I was growing up.

We never wanted your freedoms and your democracy and all of that. We wanted James Dean, motor bikes, Hell's Angels. What we actually took from America was very different from what America believed it was giving the world.

Blues artists couldn't get any work in America at all. They had to come to England and to Europe to make a living! Same with R&B and jazz. By listening to Little Richard and his lineup of sax players, I found out what it was I loved about saxophones, and about jazz.

But when I got into playing in bands in the mid-'60s, the so-called British invasion was happening, and it was apparent we could take that American music and truly make it our own. In England, transitions in taste were usually tricky. I remember that my dad had liked the big bands, but modern jazz lost him completely.

MUSICIAN: Describe your dad, Haywood Jones.

BOWIE: He was a very kind, sensitive man; very sensible. He had a strong commitment to the company that he worked for, which was a children's home - Dr. Barnardo's Children's Home. He'd been through quite a lot in his own life. After the usual Army business for five or six years, he took a theater company around England, which bankrupted him. Then he bought a nightclub in London and tried to run that. And then he decided to commit himself to helping children.

There was a great change of faith there - I'm not exactly sure how or why. We never really talked about it. Unfortunately he died before the point where we were intimate with each other, which was always a great sadness to me. We always got on cordially, very well indeed, but not with a great deal of intimacy. There was always an area where we didn't express ourselves too well with each other. I always regretted we never got to where we could really talk.

MUSICIAN: What was your mother Margaret like?

BOWIE: She was fairly authoritarian. We were never particularly close during my formative years; we're probably a lot closer now. I was really quiet as a kid, and what was more frustrating for me was that I would never say what was on my mind! I spent an awful lot of time by myself and was very happy in a book - I mean, I could just sit with a book forever, and I still do. I'm an inveterate reader because I love being transported. I loved Joseph Conrad, I thought he was terrific. His book Victory was sublime; it was everything I wanted to do, which was to explore these strange new worlds!

MUSICIAN: A song from the 1975 Station To Station sessions is a surprise bonus on Sound + Vision: Springsteen's It's Hard To Be A Saint in the City.

BOWIE: [Laughter] When we recorded that I was crazy! When his Greetings From Asbury Park record came out, I thought it was a major album, a wonderful piece of American songwriting. When we did our version of Hard To Be A Saint in the studio, a DJ from Philly said, "Oh, I know Bruce, shall I bring him down?" I said, "That will be great!" So he brought him, and we put him in the studio and played it through to him, and the guy went white. [Laughter] Bruce's face just cleared of blood. I thought, "I don't think he likes it very much."

We sat on the floor, and he was very sweet and very sociable. But I was not all that one could expect from good company at the time - I mean, I had no eyebrows then and I was wearing a red beret, and I was out of my gourd! I remember that very clearly. So the song was one thing, but encountering me as well was quite another.

The poor guy was used to hitching rides, and doing his Springsteeny things with hubcaps, and we had absolutely nothing in common at all. We stumbled through a conversation before the DJ valiantly said, "Weeellll Bruce, I'll get you back to your hotel now!" [Laughter] That was my only encounter with Bruce.

MUSICIAN: What was the period like of writing Low in Berlin in 1976? You'd gone therefrom Los Angeles after having gotten a little wild in your lifestyle.

BOWIE: It was traumatic, it really was. Because I was having a very bad fight with cocaine. I was going through a series of very deep depressions in Berlin, and I think it became evident on the Low album and then again on bits and pieces of "Heroes". But you can also hear me coming out of it through the span of those four albums: Low, "Heroes", then Lodger and then finally Scary Monsters. Scary Monsters for me has always been some kind of purge. It was me eradicating the feelings within myself that I was uncomfortable with.

MUSICIAN: Here you saying that very thing in Ashes To Ashes?

BOWIE: Very much so. You have to accommodate your pasts within your persona. You have to understand why you went through them. That's the major thing. You cannot just ignore them or put them out of your mind or pretend they didn't happen, or just say, "Oh, I was different then." It's very important to get into them and understand them. It helps you reflect on what you are now.

MUSICIAN: The excesses that creative people can put themselves through are a peculiar form of insecurity. It's almost as if they want to speed their lives up to get to the good parts.

BOWIE: I think that has an awful lot to do with it. And with cocaine you have the false impression that you're a lot better at what you're doing than you really are. Because if you see a really bad artist paint when he's on cocaine, his paintings are every bit as terrible as they would be if he wasn't doing it. There's just more of them!

MUSICIAN: During that Berlin recuperation, you went back to a rather ordinary existence, living over an auto parts shop in a poor Turkish community and riding a bicycle to get around.

BOWIE: The compensations were exactly those. It was a way of enabling me to associate again with a society I had initially shunned and was starting to feel I had permanently cut myself off from. So it was a way of reestablishing myself as a citizen of some place.

I had an enormous problem in communicating with people. Through that period it was awfully hard to open up or let others open up to me. I found a great wall there, so it was quite ironic that I chose a city with a wall to live in. But it did force me into confrontations with other people and normalized situations - or as normal as they could have been in Berlin. It was such a taut, anxious city.

MUSICIAN: You worked with Eno in Berlin. Songs you later wrote for the 1979 Lodger LP still stand out. Yassassin and African Night Right had an early world beat, flavor incorporating Turkish, Armenian and African forms.

BOWIE: I never took what would be called world beat to its fruition, but Brian Eno very much did. I think some of what we wrote together, like African Night Flight, probably gave him the impetus to get on with things like My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts - which followed pretty fast on Lodger. I think he found the idea of combining different ethnic musics against a westernized beat to be fairly stimulating. He wanted to go with a lot of them, and I didn't. But he thought what I was trying to do on those few tracks was pretty exciting, and he experimented very brilliantly and successfully with it himself.

I'd spent a month-and-a-half in Kenya before I wrote African Night Flight, and once I got there I'd taken not night flights but a number of afternoon flights with a guide called Mrs. Sutherland. She was probably in her late forties, had a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and a long cigarette holder, and she was continually losing her flight map! It was only a four-seater plane, and we'd go off into Masai territory to find rhino or whatever, and she'd buzz the airstrips where we'd land, swooping down to scatter the rhinos and giraffes. I found all that terribly exciting and it was the impetus for the song.

MUSICIAN: What's your fondest memory of 1983's Let's Dance?

BOWIE: Probably the title song, because for me it was just a mundane song, a piece of nothing. It didn't work, it didn't have anything at all. But when Nile Rodgers put his arrangement to it, it just took on life that I never thought it had. Or would ever have.

It was a throwaway for me: "Oh, I've got this other one called Let's Dance. It's kinda corny but it'll do; I suppose we could put it on side two as a piece of padding."

But Nile said, "No, let me have that." And he worked it up into this beast, a disco monster! I never foresaw that happening.

MUSICIAN: Do you think you'll ever get around to writing your autobiography?

BOWIE: [Laughs, shrugs] Who knows? But I tell you, I had a rather racy girlfriend once, and she said, "I'm going to write a book about all this; I've even told my mother about it."

I asked, "Well, what did your mother say?"

She said, "My mother had a title for it! She said to call it My Nights Under The Stars." [Winks] She had a very hip mother.

SOUND + HARDWARE

David Bowie and band are using the following instrumentation to fuel the retrospective Sound + Vision Tour: BOWIE plays Takamine acoustic guitars and a Gretsch Country Gentleman, as well as a Selmer-Paris alto sax. Vocals are via a Beyer 160 microphone. ADRIAN BELEW wields Fender Stratocasters specially modified for the Roland GR90 guitar synthesizer system. Bassist ERDAL KIZILCAY's axes are the Fender Jazz bass and the Pedulla fretless electric bass, plus a Yamaha BB1000. Drummer MICHAEL HODGES thunders upon Tama drums and Zildjian cymbals, as well as a Roland R8 drum machine and a Roland Octapad. RICK FOX's keyboards are the Roland A-80 and the Roland W-30, in addition to the Roland S-550 sampler and Yamaha TX802 synth. Programming is through the Current Music Technology Mac 'N' Rak computer.

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