(#280: 23 April
1983, 3 weeks)
Track listing:
Modern Love/China Girl/Let’s Dance/Without You/Ricochet/Criminal World/Cat
People (Putting Out Fire)/Shake It
“That's what the kid standing behind us in line was
saying as the rioters who got a fin apiece from manager Tony De Fries came
storming across the street at the door for the third time: 'I like Bowie's
music, but I don't like his personality. He's too weird.' He went on to say
that he wanted to buy a copy of The New York Dolls album but didn't because he
was afraid somebody would see the cover lying around the house and get the
wrong idea. He, like most of this audience, leaned much farther to denims than
glitter. In fact, they were downright shabby. In the traditional sense.”
(Lester Bangs, “Johnny Ray’s Better Whirlpool,” Creem, January 1975)
“I want something now that makes a statement in a more
universal, international field.”
(David Bowie, interviewed by David Thomas, The FACE No 37, May 1983)
It was Friday 1 July 1983, it was the Milton Keynes Bowl,
and it was bloody, stuffily hot. Towards the end of my second year at
university many of my peers, who even at that age should really have known
better, spoke with excited worshipfulness of attending this concert, seeing
this man. I paid for two tickets so knew no better myself. The support acts
were, in order of appearance, The Beat (nearing the end of their life) and
Icehouse, and nobody really paid either any attention.
Then, after an interval, a man calling himself David
Bowie bounded on stage, though looked more like Beckenham’s Young Businessman
Of The Year David Jones (36), in a ludicrous carrot-top bouffant, smart suit
and no tie (he reminded me of a glam Alexander Walker). He launched into “The
Jean Genie” and things were all right, even if it didn’t really sound like the
“Jean Genie” of ten years previous, and all that that had implied. He was playing to the smugly happy Thatcher
generation – all right, it was my
generation, although there were still a few stalwart hippies and bikers to be
found amongst the suffocating crowd, people who just about remembered what a
“free festival” had been – and it did its work; the hero of their younger
years, but without all that problematic weirdness, cleaned up, efficient and
ready for the enterprising eighties (there was no “Sound And Vision,” although
he did do both “Breaking Glass” and “What In The World”). I should have known
from the accompanying album and not risked the searing disappointment.
Everybody knows that “Bowie” self-destructed with Scary Monsters, or rather Lennon got
shot, which for Bowie amounted to much the same thing; he surrounded himself
with high-level security and largely retreated to Switzerland for the best part
of two years, in great part to look after his son (the young Duncan Jones, who
in 1983 would have been twelve). While there he proceeded to disengage himself messily
from RCA and MainMan management, eventually signing a contract with EMI which
some said awarded him $17.5 million.
But he continued to travel, not quite as much as he
sometimes claimed, but enough to place him in a New York nightclub somewhere in
the second half of 1982 where Billy Idol, who may or may not have been drunk,
may or may not have introduced him to Nile Rodgers. The days of Chic domination
were already a couple of years in the past; Rodgers was not quite the force
that he had been (although Chic themselves continued to release excellent, if
unsold, albums until they split in 1983) and was no doubt flattered by Bowie’s
expressed wish to work with him, even if he was to be disappointed that Bowie
did not want him to produce something darkly experimental, but rather give him
hits, get him back on the radio in America where he was largely regarded as a seventies
one-hit disco wonder. Do something for the Kansas farmers.
The generation of Let’s
Dance itself was swift if no less messy. The entire album, according to
Rodgers, was recorded and mixed in something like seventeen days, during
December 1982. People who had known Bowie before were also to be let down. Tony
Visconti had cleared time in his diary to work on the album, only to be told
that Rodgers had already been at work in the Power Station for a fortnight;
affronted, he did not speak to or work with Bowie again for almost twenty
years. Carlos Alomar was asked to provide guitar but offered only a scale fee;
Alomar told Bowie’s people what they could do with his scale fee and
consequently does not appear on the record (though was certainly onstage, along
with old sparring partner Earl Slick, at Milton Keynes). Instead Stevie Ray
Vaughan, who had chatted with Bowie at that summer’s Montreux Jazz Festival, was
brought in, and almost immediately boxed in; kept on a leash for much of the
album, he did seem to have as deep and instinctive an understanding of Bowie’s
music as any guitarist since Mick Ronson when given the opportunity to prove it
(as on both “China Girl” and the title track; Lena describes his work on the
album as being “like homemade icing on a boxed cake”). This was more than could
be said for a largely bemused Rodgers, who spent hours at a time in the studio
working up grooves in an effort to approximate what he thought Bowie wanted. It
was therefore not surprising that the end result sounded rushed, hasty and a
lot shorter than its allotted thirty-nine minutes; in his review of the album
in The FACE, Paul Rambali remarked
that “this is music in a hurry, bustling, eager, not caring to be definitive.”
But the record did the job that Bowie had intended it to
do; the title track was the biggest single of his career, the album restored
him to the upper reaches of the Billboard
Top 200 and overall sold some seven million worldwide. The man without whom, it
was felt, neither New Romanticism or New Pop would have existed – “the
granddaddy of them all,” as a rather dejected Dave Rimmer observed in Like Punk Never Happened – was back to
prove who was boss, even if it was hard for him to demonstrate how he had got
to be boss in the first place.
For I suspect Bowie viewed, and for all I know continues
to view, pop music as something curled up in the corner of the living room, or
squatting by a fire hydrant – a snake or a sedative. I think that in 1983 he
was much more interested in acting than he was in being a musician or a pop
star; whether it’s as a vampire, or Brecht’s Baal silently dining on vulture
soup, or a prisoner of war in a Japanese WW2 camp, there is a commitment in his
work – even if the acting itself isn’t very good – which contrasts sharply with
his early eighties attitude to music.
What I am working up to here is that Let’s Dance, the album, is a disgrace, one of the laziest and most
contemptuous records ever released by a major rock performer. Its eight songs
whizz by in an uninteresting and uninvolving blur and commit to nothing except
Bowie’s need to be David Bowie for another year. Never mind Elvis squatting in
the dark – “Aw shit, I might as well sing sittin’ down as standin’ up” – or
Dylan at the Free Trade Hall; it’s a surprise that nobody in the crowd at
Milton Keynes shouted out “JUDAS!,” and unutterably depressing that nobody in
the crowd at Milton Keynes felt the remotest need to do so.
Why this pallid sketchbook of half-baked songs and
winsome cover versions, or recyclings? Did Bowie, like Elvis, think that his
talent was wasted on the public, that Joe Kansas Farmer would lap up any old
shit by him if it sounded good on his rollerskate Walkman? It was almost enough
to make one question whether he had meant anything he’d written or done or sung
or played in the seventies. I have to say that I did and do not think much of
the whole Ziggy Stardust thing (and Let’s
Dance was easily Bowie’s worst album since 1972); whereas Hunky Dory and Aladdin Sane are exciting, inventive and genuinely disturbing
pieces of work, it may well be that I was four or five years too young, or too
old, to appreciate the alleged opening of floodgates that Ziggy was said to represent. All I hear in its grooves are
undercooked rockers and bathetic, hammy ballads with an overall air of a
secondary school rock opera. Even at eight I had no time for the flaccid
nursery rhyme that was “Starman,” despite the 250 million people said to have
watched him perform it on Top Of The Pops
on 6 July 1972. I myself watched that show in a boarding house in Blackpool,
where we were on holiday – it was a lousy summer that year – and don’t remember
much about it other than laughing nervously at a film clip of Dr Hook
performing “Sylvia’s Mother.” The song had entered the Top 30 at #29, and if
everyone who said they had watched the performance and it changed their lives
had actually gone out and bought the single as a result of watching it, it
would have rocketed to number one the following week. In actual fact it climbed
nine places to #20 and continued to climb unspectacularly for another couple of
weeks, peaking at #10. The number one song at the time was “Puppy Love” by
Donny Osmond.
The song and TOTP
performance from that month which I do remember vividly, and which caused a
much greater controversy than Bowie putting his arm around Ronson’s shoulder –
and which may even have appeared on the following week’s episode – was Alice
Cooper, with children’s choir and fish-eye camera lens, doing “School’s Out,”
and that shot to number one within the month and provoked questions in
Parliament. So I am sceptical of the “phenomenon” status of Ziggy Stardust, but have to admit that
even in things like “Five Years,” Bowie is playing his role with detail and
economy. I can see why some people might have been affected by the record.
Move forward a decade, however, and that detail and
economy have gone, to be replaced by roughly nailed carbon-copied sketches;
Bowie is simply not paying attention to the mechanics of his music any longer.
Like Peter Sellers, the closely observed portraits, the detailed character
studies, even the inhabitation of characters of which Bowie was once capable
were superseded by one-size-fits-all blandness; Let’s Dance is the beginning of Bowie’s Pink Panther phase, the start of his descent into the pop
equivalent of international cops n’ robbers capers.
If that sounds overstated, consider the ludicrous
arrangement of “China Girl”; originally recorded by Iggy Pop (with Bowie both
playing and producing) in 1977, it is a tortured, fuzzy portrait of
exploitation and ruination (“I’ll ruin everything you are”) by a man clearly at
the end of his tether. We hear the rinky-dink chopsticks guitar intro and
asinine backing vocals which begin Bowie’s reading and half expect a gong to
sound and Burt Kwouk to emerge. There is pain and discontent – Bowie is not
entirely unaware of the degradation which he is causing as the song progresses,
and Robert Sabino’s icy one-note descending synthesiser figures suggest
imminent apocalypse. And yet Bowie cannot decide whether he wants to be Iggy or
Billy MacKenzie or even Mick Jagger (“She says: shhhhhh”) and so offers us
fragmentary reminders of all three. Meanwhile, the Chic rhythm section (almost:
one Carmine Rojas plays bass on seven of the album’s eight songs) strut warily
as though getting ready for “Material Girl.” As a single, it was kept off
number one in the UK only by “Every Breath You Take.”
And despite Bowie’s avowed intention behind the cover –
mainly to raise some much-needed funds for the near-broke and wrecked Iggy Pop
of the first half of the eighties – it is true that the success of Let’s Dance signalled to a lot of other
pre-New Pop, and for that matter pre-punk, figures that it was possible to
return with a modern-sounding sheen and sound up to the minute. Yet the title
track does little other than hark back to the past, with its title (Chris
Montez), its introduction (“Twist And Shout”), its middle eight (with its
intimations of “Tired Of Waiting For You”), its horn charts (“Peter Gunn”), its
guitar solos (Vaughan unconsciously echoing memories of Blues Incorporated and
the early days of Mod) and even its
hesitant nods to free jazz (Mac Gollehon’s modulated trumpet, the
tenor/baritone sax duel between, I assume, Stan Harrison and Steve Elson, both
of which hark back to late sixties/early seventies practices in European jazz
and improvised music). It is said that originally the song took the form of a folksy
acoustic lament, and that makes a lot of sense – done that way, it might have
proved a soliloquy or lament worthy to stand beside “Wild Is The Wind,”
something of which the Bowie of 1983 was certainly still capable.
As a statement of intent or declaration of principles, Let’s Dance resembled Penthouse And Pavement with scant
evidence of pavement. Its mission was to Make It Big at all costs, including
those of art; Bob Clearmountain’s mix allows no subtlety to pollute its
affluent 25-lane highway of enterprise – all potential detouring elements, from
Stan Harrison’s free-jazz saxes to Stevie Ray Vaughan’s gamma rays of blues
guitar, are cut and pasted onto the template, are neutralised.
The “Twist And Shout” quotes at the beginning and the nod
to “Tired Of Waiting For You” in the title track’s middle eight also suggest a
ceremonial burial of all that the sixties stood for (if anything), this
particular sixties survivor having matured, grown up and prospered, putting
away childish things like subversion or adventure. There are those hushed sighs
of dread in the second verse – “for fear your grace should fall,” “for fear
tonight is all” – which do put the song several leagues above drivel like “Is
There Something I Should Know?” even if one senses a dread of Billy MacKenzie
in Bowie’s trembling tenor (Fourth Drawer
Down and Sulk are the kind of
“pop” records a hungrier Bowie and sterner Eno might have gone on to make,
though Eno arguably transplanted the Berlin heart of Bowie into the Lower East
Side soul of David Byrne – Remain In
Light and Bush Of Ghosts really
are everything that post-1980 Bowie isn’t, or couldn’t be). It’s still five
years until the end of the world (“Because my love for you/Would break my heart
in two,” the controlled shriek on the “flower” of “tremble like a flower”) but
now, unlike Ziggy, the lease is renewable (and as for the video, what do
Australia, or upright basses, or Aborigines observing far-off nuclear
explosions, mean at all in this
context?).
And that seems to sum up the problem of eighties Bowie
for me; the magnification of his less attractive factors which had always been
present, even at his seventies peak, notably the avoidance of direct engagement
and the smouldering contempt for Other People. That is why Low is his masterpiece; he can disappear into the music completely
and yet still summon up all his demons of emptiness in the still shocking
(because so rarely revealed) open vulnerability of “Be My Wife,” a song as
central to any understanding of Bowie as “Madame George” is to Van Morrison,
since the rest of his career could be said to consist of running as far away
from that vulnerability as his accountants can manage – its equivalent on this
record is “Without You,” the only song to feature Bernard Edwards on bass (and
you can instantly feel the
difference), an earnest enough ballad with lyrics that would embarrass Boyzone.
But the album cover screamed what Bowie hilariously and
inexplicably called “Serious Moonlight”; there he is, stripped to the waist in
half-darknesss, throwing boxing shadow punches like a reborn Daniel Mendoza (of
whom Peter Sellers was a direct descendant); ready to shed the weirdness, go
back out into the world and mean business. Its opening track, “Modern Love,”
showed that Beckenham’s Young Businessman Of The Year was ready to spar with
the best, and worst, of them. Opening
with Rodgers’ guitar coughing into life, like the engine of a Delorean car, the
drummer - both Tony Thompson and Omar
Hakim are credited with drums on the album but I think it’s Thompson, although
with the now obligatory gated sound the difference is made minimal – starts up
and Bowie begins his speech to the Beckenham Young Conservatives: “I know when
to go out/I know when to stay in/Get things done,” he announces, his voice
midway between Michael Caine and Ricky Gervais – and it’s a warning; don’t
expect any avant-gardey weirdouts on this record.
He then proceeds to recite a lyric which makes no sense
at all, even as it paraphrases “Walk On By,” My Fair Lady and “Imagine,” other than a generalised
disillusionment with This Shallow Eighties World. What better way to fight that
world than to sound as much like it as possible? And so we get the stupidest
backing vocals in pop since Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World” (“Sci-ENCE book,”
“French I took,” “Church on time”), a baritone sax solo so wooden I thought Bowie played it (he only sings on
this record; Robert Aaron’s closing tenor solo is much better) and an overall
feeling of…what? It is akin to Sellers’ no-good pirate in Ghosts In The Noonday Sun rapidly turning in his cabin to pray to
four different holy shrines – whatever the option, Bowie doesn’t go for it, and
so is he offering a scalding indictment of the hollowness of Thatcher/Reagan
culture? And if he is, how would, or could, you really tell? As a single, it
was only kept off number one in the UK by “Karma Chameleon.” No wonder Bowie
felt, despite his repeated reassurances of “But I try,” he didn’t really need
to try. Not in the eighties.
Foreshadowing a future cardinal rule of big-selling
albums, Let’s Dance gives you the
hits up front at the front – but there’s still the rest of the album to
consider. Side two really is nothing (to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, there’s no “there”
there). “Ricochet” is a disastrous attempt at seventies David Bowie which ends
up in an eighties nowhereland with Peter Gabriel-esque polyrhythms, would-be
Laurie Anderson cut-ups and a song which would have been far better suited to
Bryan Ferry, except that Ferry would have been too smart to write the song in
the first place (although Jim Kerr might also have done it better justice). Its
worst factor is perhaps its lyric, a would-be indictment of brutal modern
society which sounds as though taken from cut-and-pasted Daily Mail headlines; set against Roger Waters’ songs on The Final Cut, which stay acutely close
to their targets and name names, Bowie’s yawning laxity here verges on the
offensive.
Whereas his sanitised reading of Metro’s “Criminal World”
is just wrong on too many levels. Remember what so many people claim to have
felt with “Starman” and how comprehensively the businessman Bowie of 1983
rubbishes their hopes and ideals. Metro were the sort of act now routinely
referred to as “proto-eighties electronic duo,” which doesn’t do them any sort
of justice; they were Peter Godwin and Duncan “Journey” Browne (and later also
Sean Lyons) and the melancholia of their work put them about halfway between
Gabriel’s Genesis and post-1983 Tears For Fears. “Criminal World,” a
much-lauded single which sold very sparsely, was an undisguised song about bisexuality.
What tribute did Bowie, a man who had once spectacularly described himself as
bisexual, mean to pay the song?
He paid tribute by reworking the song entirely and surgically
removing anything in its lyric liable to upset the farmers of Kansas. This
coincided with an interview with Rolling
Stone in May 1983 in which he cheerfully denied that he had ever been anything
except heterosexual; the interview was trailed by a characteristically
sensitive cover headline of “DAVID BOWIE STRAIGHT!” At a time when the Aids
nightmare was making itself known, and in the context of a decade where
attitudes to Aids and HIV seemed to suggest that humanity had not advanced a
jot since the Middle Ages, this was seen as a terrible betrayal – in wanting to
get on the radio and into record stores, he had turned his back on his
heartland. His version of “Criminal World” is also musically tame compared with
the original’s fiery ambiguity (the rhythm section now sound as though
rehearsing for “Like A Virgin”). Overall the unpleasant experience made a lot
of people wonder whether Bowie had ever meant or believed in anything, whether
in fact he was nothing more than pop’s Anthony Burgess, a vaudeville charlatan,
a chancer two crucial points ahead of his followers who agreed with every
question an interviewer asked him (in his FACE
interview he speaks movingly of his attempts to overcome his fear of flying;
this was somewhat undermined by the later revelation that he and his entourage
had a private jet booked for the entirety of the Serious Moonlight Tour, in
which they reportedly wined and dined like royalty), someone with lots of
ideas, even if they weren’t his own and he tended to forget them a couple of
minutes later (the running gag in early eighties NME of Bowie expressing enthusiasm for such-and-such a band or
artist: “I’ve got all their records at home – sorry, who is it we’re talking
about again?”).
I never thought much of the original, Moroder-produced
1982 reading of “Cat People,” but it is like Diamanda Galas’ “Wild Women With
Steak Knives” compared with the pub rock re-recording essayed here; Bowie
misses the initial “gasoline” run entirely – in fact, dives to avoid it – and his
palpable disinterest is so manifest that when we get to the “been so long”
section it is (as Lena said) rather as if Bowie is waiting for his club
sandwich. The crass skinny-tie organ makes it sound like Racey, and it’s a tragedy
that this is the same keyboard player who once closed “At Last I Am Free” with
such bruised elegance. The record ends poorly with “Shake It,” a nondescript
downsizing of “Let’s Dance” with some appalling lyrics, or juxtaposition of the
words of others: “We’re the kind of people who can make it if we’re feeling blue…When
I’m feeling disconnected, well I sure know what to do.” Which in Bowie’s case
means quoting the ancient television game show What’s My Line? His closing rendition of “Bring Me Sunshine” is
awaited in vain. And, amazingly, this was not Bowie’s last number one album of
the eighties, nor his worst. From New Pop he appeared to have learned nothing
other than the need to “get ahead,” and as the decade wore on he did wonder
where and how he had ended up. Looking back
in 1997, in an interview with Steve Pond for Live! magazine, he said: “At the time, Let's Dance was not mainstream. It was virtually a new kind of
hybrid, using blues-rock guitar against a dance format. There wasn't anything
else that really quite sounded like that at the time. So it only seems
commercial in hindsight because it sold so many. It was great in its way, but
it put me in a real corner in that it fucked with my integrity.”
Myself, I think Let’s
Dance couldn’t have been more mainstream;
it more or less defined the mainstream of its time. “So it only seems commercial
in hindsight”; but he had told Nile Rodgers in 1982 that he specifically wanted
hits. The melancholic conclusion here has to be that to fuck with someone’s
integrity, one has to have some integrity in the first place.
Next: Cabaret Futura.
