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A lyrical interpretation
by Jonathan Greatorex
Let's Dance
EMI AML3029
April 1983
Bowie completed `The Elephant Man' early in 1981, and, following the large success of' Ashes To Ashes', RCA released two more tracks from the `Scary Monsters' album, with only `Fashion' forming any real impression.
The rest of the year saw Bowie indulging in his favourite pursuits, painting, skiing, globetrotting and acting. However, while relaxing in Switzerland there was a chance meeting with Queen, the British rock band, and the two parties produced a one-off collaboration, `Under Pressure' at the Mountain Studios in Montreux. Lyrically, `Under Pressure' entertained a similar theme to that permeating `Scary Monsters' - an optimistic belief that a perspective humanity may possess some credulity for real emotion.
The song is individually split through a string of excellently executed melodies, by Mercury and Bowie, both blessed with exceptional vocal chords.
From the onset the statement is one which admits universal oppression. "Pressure, pushing down on me, pressing down on you, no man asked for."
The inducement is elongated by a comparative analogy to the position society has driven itself in embittering it's inhabitants. Where buildings are wantonly destroyed.
Families internally abandoned and people left dependent upon the state. Reality is all too predictable. "It's the terror of knowing what this world is about, watching some good friend screaming `Let me out'."
The orator optimistically yearns for salvation, yet the coercion remains on street level.
The singer admits to turning "away from it all like a blind man", a contrary notion to that advocated in `It's No Game'; even the adoption of a liberal stance, "Sat on a fence but it don't work."
For all roads to freedom point in one direction, as impossible as it is intangible. "Keep coming up with love but it's so slashed and torn Why ?"
The concept of `love' has been relegated to mythology. Because it is not part of the `Vogue', it is regarded as speculative fantasy. Thus, "insanity laughs" as the demon `pressure' infiltrates, cracking and emulsifying logical interpretation. Defiantly, the optimistic plea calls out. "Can `t we give ourselves one more chance, why can `t we give Love that one more chance. " Sadly, the rejection of love is brought about by that same reasoning behind the origin of pressure. `Love' is an archaic term, a submissive historical fallacy, prompting feelings of humanity an emaciated world. " `Cause loves such an old fashioned word and love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the night. " Yet most abhorrent, "Love dares you to change our ways of caring about ourselves . "
` Ourselves `, being now this loveless breed . Yet still the plea will not desist . "This is our last dance - this is ourselves." The song can quite rightly be accused of melodrama, yet `subtlety' may not have produced the desired effect. After all, the last thing the thane of the song needs is an obtuse and distracting interpretation of a very direct and forceful lyric .
Bowie`s next venture, towards the end of 1981, was to join forces with director Alan Clarke, in a film presentation of Bertolt Brecht `s play- `Baal `, with the intention of it being televised the following March.
The play, being Brecht's first, is an amoral tale. interspersed with songs delivered by Baal, an anarchic singer and poet. It is set in the ten years preceding the First world War, with the wandering minstrel being befriend by Mech, a wealthy patron of the arts. Upon invitation to a society party, Baal meets and seduces Mech's beautiful wife, Emilie, who is captivated by his rustic attire and bawdy tongue. She visits the local cafe where he works entertaining off-duty cab drivers with his songs, and he puts her loyalty to the test .
Two years hence, and Baal has a new mistress, Sophie, who, also enticed by the singers charismatic appeal, allows herself to be humiliated as part of his cabaret act, this time in a decadent night-club. Following an argument with Mjurk, the night-club proprietor, concerning pay, Baal quits. He, Sophie and Eckhart, a musician friend, set out to roam under the open skies of the South German countryside.
Finally, bereft of his companions, (The girl pregnant and Eckhart murdered in a fit of jealousy), Baal dies, wrecked in squalor and degradation, possibly riddled with every conceivable disease, yet happily gazing at the laconic blue sky, his vision of total freedom.
Bowie had admired Clarke's work ever since he had seen the film `Scum' set in a boys Borstal. `He made an imprint on me then. I saw a couple of other things he did, and I knew if he was doing it, it would be terrific.'
The play demands that the person playing the title role has to make convincing the power and appeal of Brecht's poet/monster. As Henry Fenwick, Of the Radio Times, indicated; the actor needs to possess `that particular brand of destabilising magnetism.'
Bowie had been an admirer of Brecht ever since his introduction to the German poet by his mime teacher, Lindsay Kemp, in the late 1960s.(Kemp was also responsible for Bowl many previous influences - writers Kurt Weill and Jean Genet, and film producer Fritz Lang)
The character of Baal entertained a similar ambivalent sexual appeal to those of Bowie's earlier stage manifestations. The play also contained traces of Rimbaud, which the singer would have also found appealing. However, Bowie reprimanded direct association by indicating that he and the character differed in that `Baal is quite resigned to the fact that the human race is going to topple itself - in any given situation that he can concoct, the people in that situation will let that Situation down and ruin everything, and he expects that, and wants that.'
Bowie, as witnessed through his more recent writings, was a lot more optimistic about the human condition. He felt that there was a `resolute wave of indignation building up in people to the conditions they've been put in', personified through the `Under Pressure' single.
He admitted to having complete faith in the human spirit's ability to pull itself through - a notion lacking in the ultra-pessimistic Baal.
In conversation with David Jensen, he retrospectively saw the role as being much stronger in the reading than actual presentation. Eels was no admission of being defeated by the part, for, `looking back on it, and having seen it since it's broadcast, I find it a very strong piece of television, but not very accessible.'
Bowie was inferring that the action was difficult to define, as the characters, when screened, were diminutive in appearance. He enjoyed the role as Baal was such a gregarious loud person, an emotional cripple-the hallmark of Bowie's characterisations. - `When I look at roles, they either have to have an emotional or physical limp.'
RCA, true to form, released the compilation `ChangesTwoBowie' for the 1981 Christmas market much to Bowie's disapproval, (This was later echoed with the release of `David Rare' a year later `If they had asked me, I could have presented them with a far more interesting selection of material.'
1982 saw Bowie principally fulfilling his desire and ambition to act. There were only three little vinyl releases that year, an EP soundtrack to Baal, the theme song to Paul Schrader's `Cat People' (discussed in context with `Let `s Dance') and his duet with Bing Crosby, recorded five years before.
`David Rare', was a vain attempt to milk the cow dry. The album wasn't at all `rare' - a collection of `B' sides coupled with a shortened version, (although different), of `Young Americans', and European translations of `Space Oddity' and `Heroes', neither of which had been too difficult to find previously.
MERRY CHRISTMAS MR LAWRENCE
In The Hunger, Bowie plays a predatory blood-sucker ,whose time- clock goes wrong because he's not a real vampire. It was directed by Tony Scott, best known for his work in `Hovis' television advertisements. As the film progresses, there is an internal feeling that the entire production has the feel of an elongated commercial. However, such a quality does not detract, moreover enhances the viewers appreciation.
It is beautifully filmed with striking images, similar in editorial at quality to Roeg's style, that which ensures a compatible pacing of scenes, whether ongoing or jump-cutting. Scott 98 brother, Ridley, is an established director in his own right, with memorial products such as `Alien' and `Blade Runner' well entrenched beneath his belt. Because of it's subject matter, the film is often disturbing, occasionally shocking, yet equally captivating and enjoyable to wash. Scott provides little time for the viewer to comfort himself in his chair, as the action immediately asserts itself wife a collection of numbing visual and audio effects in a discotheque, with Bauhaus ironically pounding out an overtly camp rendition of `Bela Lugosi's Dead'.
Bowie's role in the film is minimal, but extremely effective. He begins as a young John Baylock, discovering `liver spots', and ageing from his mid-thirties to 300 in slightly over two days. The visual way in which this happens owes a great deal to the work of the sets make-up artist, Dick Smith. Bowie has to operate through several layers of latex which Smith had applied muscle to muscle. Consequently, when Bowie twitches a muscle in his face, it is reflected in the make-up itself. This provides possibly the most haunting aspect of the entire film, aided greatly by bowies outstanding performance as an old man whose body yearns to melt into the soil. Catherine DeNeueve and Susan Sarandon are equally compelling in their roles, (despite their critics `field-day' lesbian scene), making the film a promising first attempt by Mr. Scott. The Hunger, a U.A./M.G.M. release, received it's first screening on May 8th 1983, at the Palace Theatre, London, for the benefit of the crew who had worked on it, before being released to general license.
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
`I never really found acting fulfilling. The best part of it was watching the directors at work, watching films either come together or fall apart. But working with Oshima has changed all that.'
Nagasi Oshima reached the western world in 1978 with his highly controversial erotic masterpiece, `Ai No Corrida.' While in New York he went to one of the late productions of `The Elephant Man', offering Bowie the part of Jack Celliers in the film adaptation of Laurent Van Der Post's autobiographical story, `The Seed And The Sower'.
As the director remembered,
'I knew immediately that he was Celliers, he has an inner spirit that is indestructible, and that is what `Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence' is all abet human spirit that war cannot touch'.
In Bowie's words,
'Oshima gave me a gift. He gave me responsibility for my part. It was wonderful being an actor in a movie, not just a movie actor - There's a big difference.'
The film is by far Bowie's most effective and challenging, and one which went the furthest to establish him as a force in acting as opposed to a rock n' roll singer-turned-thespian.
The film is set in a Japanese POW camp on Java in 1942, and also features Tom Conti in the title role of Lawrence; a British colonel, who, throughout the film attempts to act as a mediator between captors and captives, rewarded by contempt by both sides.
It alternates between extremes of sensitivity and savagery. On one hand there is an embittered fanatical young Samurai Camp Commandant, Captain Yonoi,(played by Yellow Magic Orchestra musician, Ryuichi Sakamoto, who also scored the soundtrack to the film); and on the other, the laconic Jack Celliers, who appears equally fanatical in his own obsession to a code of faith. The relationship between the two is a compelling extremity of ambivalence, based upon different concepts of what actually constitutes `honour'.
Tom Conti, the affable English officer, vainly tries to develop some kind of rapport between his opposite Sergeant Hara, (played by Takeshi), but neither can placate the extremities of inhumanity developed by Celliers and Yonoi. The result is a genuine threat to the order and organisation of the camp. As Bowie reflected,
`The movie really shows how the Japanese can only exist if they know they're correct. The Japanese in the film are shown so starkly that if we'd done it, it would have been a racist slur.'
Through Oshima's direction, it explains very extreme evaluations of life and Japanese nuances.
After viewing the film, shot on Rarotonga in the Cook Isles of the South Pacific, with a cast and crew of eleven nationalities, one can understand what it was about Bowie that Nagasi Oshima found fascinating.
He has such a physical frailty, matched by an indestructible spirit, which compels the viewer to comprehend how Celliers continues to exist, purely on instinct and nerve. Bowie is capable of providing immense passion, something that supersedes reason.
`The film points up the fact that the war itself was a nationally organised form of theft. Hopefully, I think it's the best piece of work I've done. Well, I think it is. Western directors tend to dictate the structure of the performance. I think Oshima frees actors. There's a strong parallel actually, with the way I record and the way he makes movies.'
Bowie had accepted the four natural acting progressions: Hofsiss, through Clarke and Scott, to Oshima, with thankful relief. They had provided him with ample time to settle back and consider how he wanted to record in the future, and the sort of recordings he would make. He had become increasingly aware of a complacency with `synthesised' music, seeking a way to break from it. Consequently, he started going back into his own expansive and diverse record collection discovering many rhythm and blues tracks which used to constitute a large proportion of his life when he was a teenager in London. The resulting influence crept into the `Let's Dance' album, albeit to a lesser degree. Not that the album would hit a person over the head with Elmore James' riffs, it was more a plethora of old rhythm n' blues techniques.
The two overriding objectives in his mind when nearing completion of filming on Rarotonga were to find a new record company to work with, and a sympathetic record producer. The first of these naturally involved his disassociation with the Record Corporation of America, his contractual obligations fulfilled with the `Scary Monsters' album. By the end of this contract with RCA there had been no love lost between either party.
Bowie considered that the belief had gone in each other. `I didn't believe in RCA and they certainly had fallen out with me around the time of `Low'. There was no real interest in `Low' or any of the albums from there on.'
The two parties merely went through the process of being artist and record company. 'I was quite glad when I was able to terminate that particular contract. Familiarity had bred contempt, we were quite happy to take a short space from each other.'
A new deal with EMI AMERICA was signed towards the end of 1982, and only following his recording and subsequent album with Nile Rodgers was the announcement made public in New York's Carlyle Hotel in January 1983.
Rodgers first taste of success had been in 1977 with `Dance, Dance, Dance', a wonderfully calculated piece of disco marketing, with it' 8 funky hand claps and slinky guitar riffs. The still faceless group, Chic, followed with `Everybody Dance'.
Without actually seeing Nile Rodgers, Tony Thompson or Bernard Edwards, many thought Chic to be a group of girl singers deliberately placed up-front - just another studio band. It was only upon the release of Chic's first album that turned the `disco truism' on it's ear. Rodgers guitar, influenced by Jimi Hendrix, blended perfectly with Edward's `James Brown' school of funk: the result of which became a distinctive Chic Organisation sound.
Rodgers produced many of the early eighties sophisticated yet danceable records which could hold their own against any Giorgio Moroder offering. Notably, Sister Sledge, Norma Jean, Diana Ross, and more recently the guitarist Michael Gregory Jackson. Listening to `Good Times' from Chic's `Risqué' album was the closest thing the American's had home-grown, to compete with a Jamaican dub record, Edward's relentless bass line being an inspiration for a host of imitators. Tony Thompson's percussive feel to many of Chic's melodic structures is undeniably present on `Shake It', `Let's Dance', `Cat People', and to a lesser degree `Without You' on Bowie's album.
Bowie and Nile Rodgers met up in an after-hours club in New York while Bowie was on one of his America-Rarotonga- Japan-Europe meanderings. A few drinks, coupled with musical discussion developed into a mutual appreciation of each others roots and reference points, especially in the light of Bowie's re-discovery of an authentic R & B sound.
With the new album in mind, not yet conveyed to Rodgers, he was wanting to capture a form of enthusiasm instead of getting into another formal exercise. (The Alomar/Davls/ Murray team had been operating for over six years at this point).
Bowie desperately wanted to make a new start with musicians who he hadn't worked with and who were unfamiliar with his methods. He required a group of musicians who played straight in their own ideals He felt that there was too much familiarity with the band he had been working with over the past several years, and, in musical terms, the ideas had become rigidly predictable because minds could be read too easily.
Rodgers therefore seemed the perfect choice to work with because they both had common influences in artists such as Red Prysock Big Band, Stan Kenton and Albert King. As Rodgers recalls, `He came over to my apartment and we talked for a while. Then I played him my solo LP, (`Adventures In The Land of The Good Groove.') which he really liked. I then went to Switzerland with him and we spent some time on pre-production and arrangement ideas. So by the time we went into the studios all the material was written and ready.'
Through the album, Bowie produced something that was warmer and more altruistic than anything he had recorded for a long while. He had withdrawn the nihilistic tendencies found on previous albums, replacing them with more `humanistic' attitudes. However, when suggested that he had become a renewed' person, he disagrees, saying: `It's that I've recognised that I'm emotionally responsive to things, and finding that out has changed my music somewhat. I hope the surprise will be the optimism of the Overall nature of the thing. I hope that it has a kind of warmth that will surprise more than any other aspect of it.
`Modern Love', the opening track of `Let's Dance', possesses that now familiar attribute of Bowie linking a formative album to the present, in this case bridging a gap of nearly two years. From the eerie refrain of `Ashes To Ashes', in which `To get things done' he is advised to reflect and not meddle, we are entertained by the opening lines of this new track: "I know when to go out, when to stay in. Get things done." Still heavily committed to change, (as exemplified by no familiar up-front musicians), Bowie had decided to channel his energies towards a positive direction. He almost reluctantly confesses that to many, he has "just the power to charm"; taking this one step further in the second verse, by admitting, "It `s not really work".
But the real statement undercuts defeatism, he may still be "standing in the wind" or "lying in the rain", but he'll "Never wave bye-bye." This defiance to hail farewell is directed still at that nagging beast of an inability to accept the philosophy of the `less romantic' emotional side of modern love.
No matter how much he tries and tries to come to terms with a `Nine-to-Five' arrangement, he knows he can never topple into it's world. The pace of the song makes this clear in much the same way that `Panic In Detroit' reflected the voraciousness of that city. Ironically, this melody is so bouncy, it's got a `Gotta Dance To Keep From Crying' atmosphere. As the writer himself declared; `I think you could dance to about everything on it, but really, `Let's Dance', by virtue of it's title is the only real dance track on it.'
The exasperation of modern love bares an equal make-up to the disillusionment with warm emotion felt on `Station To Station' and `Low'. However, this time the fingers are not vainly reaching out to grasp the impossible, they are closed together, accepting the truth for what it is, disregarding the pain: "Modern love walks beside me, walks on by me, gets me to the church on time." The church is an elaborate metaphor for Bowie's own morality. He is terrified by the possibility of making an incorrect decision, especially that which concerns his own emotions. It would "make him party", as opposed to being `barred from the event'. After all, his morality shapes his "trust in God and Man", and God and Man he is both. He has no confessions to make to himself for he is his own religion, and as he is himself, he is not required to "believe in modern love
When Bowie was planning his visit to Rarotonga to film the Oshima movie, he opted to take with him several cassettes and tapes to listen to. By surprise, he discovered that his hand instinctively reached for late fifties and early sixties rhythm and blues material. As he remembered, `I wanted to find something that I could play again and again, because the South Pacific can be very boring'
It also transpired that this choice of music was preferred because it had such a human emotional quality that didn't have the audacity to pinpoint a `type' situation. `There's an enthusiasm and optimism in those recordings.'
What Bowie glued onto the enthused musical optimism, was a lyrical piece which plays around with just the fabric of what can be done within the context of a love song, and how potent it can be made to sound. There is a degree of angst in the song, ostensibly it' 8 a dance melody, but there is an air of desperation and poignancy about it. "If you say run, I'll run with you. And if you say hide, we'll hide. Because my love for you would break my heart in two, if you should fall into my arms and tremble like a flower." That certain angst arises from Bowie devising a lyric that yearns for an altruistic love `feeling', bringing with it a slightly evasive quality of desperation.
By placing key lines such as "For fear your grace should fall, for fear tonight is all", he is intending to grab his audience in an effort to make them wince slightly at the prospect. Sentimentality, and all it's downfalls are thus held at bay, and a more `real-life' situation is brought to the fore. As Bowie indicated at his press interview at London's Claridges in March 1983, `It has the intention of being danceable, but in terms of lyric I've tried to keep it simple. I'm trying to write in a more positive and obvious manner. I'm not quite so concerned with using the juxtaposition of lyrics.'
"You could look into my eyes, under the moonlight, the serious moonlight." As an additional footnote to the `Let's Dance' single release, it was promoted by Bowie's seventh excursion into using the media of video. He had arrived in Sydney in early March, 1983, staying with a group of friends, Cliff Richard, Dire Straits and Joni Mitchell, in order to film two promotional films for the yet to be released album. He was accompanied on his trip by his son, P.R. lady, Coco Schwabe, and the co-director of his earlier video's, David Mallet. The `Let's Dance' promotional was recorded in Australians semi-bushland and in Sydney itself. Bowie wanted to depress the false `tribal war-painted' stereotyped labelling of the Aboriginal people in much the same context as he deflowered the Geisha girl myth on the opening track of `Scary Monsters'.
He solicited the talents of two local `modern' aborigines, Terry and Jolene, to enact the principal roles in the film. `I wanted to find a couple of really just pleasant-looking modern people who just happened to be Aborigines.'
Dance student Jolene, and her boyfriend, Terry fitted the parts perfectly, yet Bowie was once again misinterpreted, as silly questions concerning racism were circulated.
For the part of the China Girl in the song of the same name, he selected from a Sydney model agency a New Zealand-born girl of Chinese parentage, Geeling. Bowie later requested that she would join him on the European leg of the `Serious Moonlight' tour.
Although `Let's Dance' deliberately sets out to inhibit sentimentality, `Without You' appears to succumb to it's whims, being an overt, plainly romantic love song. "When I'm ready to throw in my hand, when the best things in life are gone, I look into your eyes." The track wag the first which Bowie wrote for the album, and therefore, with his initial desire to produce music on a one-to-one basis, it may have been a form of experimentation. He was sorting out the ideas of discovering his new location in an emotional context, being less dispassionate and intentionally teasing himself away from the observer stance.
He had found it all too easy to drift into a nihilistic state when writing, but was now at a stage where he could pull out of such a restrictive role. `I feel my life, my own personal life, more positively, and in a nutshell I feel that will be reflected in my music.'
He felt that this exercise of becoming participant rather than observer directly had a bearing on his personal life, and with it, the more cohesively positive quality of his music. "There's no smoke without fire, you`re exactly who I want to be with. Without you what would I do." A declaration of love using a minimal quantity of words. The statement is not based along formal principals, Bowie's lines are rendered by a modernist, the poetry of everyday speech, and, as Charles Shaar Murray pointed out: 'more relevant, the grandeur and importance of each individual life.'
In `Ricochet', even the music promotes a `skipping' nature to the song with it's 6/8 rhythm. The most oblique and disjointed track on the album, Ricochet' bounces like a Gilbert and Sullivan translation of a Dylan Thomas poem. The track stands alone on the album in being, not only the most verbose, but the most politically motivated. However, it does keep in line with the general altruistic theme. A large amount is also owed to Bob Clearmountain's mixing techniques at New York's Power Station.
The song gives a clear indication of Bowie's ability to fuse European and American styles. European musicians tend to have a specific thematic mastery in terms of motif and melody. `Ricochet' being decidedly British, is set against an American musicianship, producing an interesting hybrid.
The obvious American rhythmic overlaying balances neatly with this British melody line.
The song entertains a similar theme to that of `Fantastic Voyage' on the `Lodger' album. This is made more pertinent by the choice of words to describe the loss of remembrance, and the `putting out of mind' of this world's social problems. On `Lodger'- "I've got to write it down and it won't be forgotten", and `Ricochet's -"Who can bear to be forgotten".
Bowie is still deeply concerned with the plight of the human race, the less-able of which are seen as "Weeds on a rockface waiting for the scythe." To be `weeds' in a field, awaiting the `Grim Reaper', would be a deeply daunting prospect in itself, but as Bowie indicates, the situation is far more severe. `Genuine' humanity has already been pushed over the edge, yet still awaits judgement by society's elite.
"The world is on the corner waiting for jobs" is a more direct statement in need of little translation, emphasising why the holy pictures,(beliefs), should be turned "so they face the wall". The writer's agnosticism is not a loss of religious faith, but a profound uncertainty in some elements of humanity. The flowers who march in to replace the weeds are representatives of those who `wipe out an entire race', the affluent effluence who uphold the "March of dimes." The prisons are poverty, the crime is injustice.
The panoramic situation conjures etchings produced in the early nineteenth century, depicting encroaching industrialisation on rural life. This latest revolution is that of the Mammon: " Sound of thunder. Sound of gold. Sound of the devil braking parole." The epithet of `Times change, values don't', has been overturned, one more reason to reverse those holy pictures.
The faith and hope which Bowie still retains is that of the ability of mankind to bounce back in an assertive fashion " Ricochet, it's not the end of the world" In the meantime, the disillusioned majority of the world's population return to their hovels, "damp-eyed and weary", where they clutch the earth's future generations to their heaving, heavy chests, "making unfulfillable promises" reiterating their master's false assurances. "For who can bear to be forgotten."
`I guess it's ageing, getting older, but I now have a very direct link with the future. My son, just because of his presence, keeps telling me there is a tomorrow, that there is a future, and there's no point in screwing up today; because every day you screw up is going to have an effect - karma wise, on the future. One just adjusts.'
To Bowie, youth is a passing grace, when gone it is replaced by another viewpoint in life that is this time tempered by experience. To this end the future becomes a very important asset. In order to straighten up and correct the path that the future should take, Bowie believes it necessary to be aware of the current mess and misbehaviour, for only through experiencing it can any real lasting impression on the future be made.
He was a single parent, with a son, and more than anything else over the past five years, this particular fact had moulded his general outlook.
During an interview with `The Face' magazine, Bowie was asked which crime offended him the most. He condensed `Ricochet' into two sentences: `Seeing a man humble himself in his capacity as a worker to somebody else, and having to have that accepted as a given situation. I think that really is a crime, a continuing crime, that probably is the cause of more social problems than just about anything else'
For the film re-make of `Cat People', director Paul Schrader chose Bowie to write the lyrics and Giorgio Moroder to score the music. Despite Bowie's inference that the original lacked conviction, it complemented well the general atmosphere of the film. As a track for the album however, it would not have succeeded, which is why Bowie and Rodger's had it re-arranged. The Chic influence is very strong on the new production, principally because Rodger's guitar is brought to the.
Lyrically, the song is a colourful string of images, concerned with burning the candle at both ends. It has a wealth of harrowing sensual phrases that forge themselves onto the mind. "See these eyes so green, I can stare for a thousand years, colder than the moon." The colour green is associated with the extremities of physical and emotional coldness, whereas the second verse, in fitting with the underlying philosophy of extremes, produces a sensation of the infernos "Eyes so red, red like jungle, burning bright."
In the final verse it is fully realised why Bowie decided to include `Cat People' in preference to several other tracks he and Rodgers had recorded. It is explanatory of the situation in which Bowie has now recognised himself to be. "See these eyes so blue, an ageless heart that can never mend. These tears can never dry. a judgement made can never bend." He is not asking for pity, just a request to accept him for what he is.
The album is altruistic, the warmth being partly derivative from his son, yet it is not altruistically definitive . Bowie concedes to being unable to produce such an album, what he is attempting is to get another lyric form in terms of simplicity, dealing with things on a more humanistic level, not totally, but it is not as detached and falsely objective in the manner of some of his earlier wanderings. He was searching for a sleek, stylish sound that swayed with a soul swagger, and found it in one which rekindled the fascination of the R & B music which many years previously had been an integral part of David Jones's self- discovery. It appears from this record at least, that David Jones, the soul, and David Bowie, the shell, have organically merged as one. He had at last found himself....perhaps.
With the new EMI/Capitol deal, estimated to be worth well into an eight-figure sum; a global success with both the album and single releases: favourable responses from public and critics alike regarding the three newly-released films, (Ziggy Stardust' had been premiered at Cannes along with 'The Hunger' and `Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence'), he could have quite easily have sat back on his laurels and adopted a `low profile' for a few years, if it were not for the fact that David Bowie, generalist, has an insatiable lust for life.
And so, on March 17th, 1983, he announced the dates of a world tour, similar in route to that of "Heroes" in 1978; from Europe, through America to Australasia. When asked what prompted such an undertaking, he explained that it had occurred to him that there were many songs he had not performed, 'And it felt like a really exiting way of doing something on stage again.'
As it transpired, he would have been touring a year earlier if it were not for the Oshima film.
`Now that I've been able to start with a new company, and, probably a new band,' (With the re-enlistment of Carlos Alomar), I've a new feeling for what I want to do in the eighties, which has got a lot of enthusiasm going for me.'
The concerts were dubbed, `The Serious Moonlight Tour' because Bowie wanted something that would give a general atmosphere to the performances. `Serious Moonlight', with ties romantic flavouring provided him with the inherent quality of two people being alone, Bowie and his audience.
A sub-text to the `Let's Dance' album was this one-to-one humanistic feel, in an attempt to view the world through the eyes of a couple. A return, really to the `Ziggy Stardust'-type tour, with the artist relating to his audience and not being alienated from them.
The programme cameo'd virtually every period related to in this book, however, much of the actual presentation was criticised and marred by poor management on the part of the tour organisers. It became apparent that Bowie's name, (not the man), as a commodity, could not be exploited by a couple of nights here and there. Perhaps his greatest understatement during the Claridges interview was, `We're doing as much as we can in each country, where there seems to be an audience for what I do.'
The band, had Carlos Alomar on rhythm guitar, (Nile Rodgers would also have been there if not for his own touring commitments) Tony Thompson, also from Chic, played drums. Stevie Ray Vaughan, who played lead on the `Let's Dance' album was also to have toured.
Bowie first saw Vaughan at Montreux's Jazz festival in 1981, and immediately thought him to be one of the most exciting new blues guitarists he'd seen in years. However, for the concert Earl Slick adopted the lead, (now free to do as he wished). Carmine Rojas was on bass. With the Borneo Horns section, and the Simms Brothers on backing vocals, the entourage was complete.
The Serious Moonlight computer-driven lighting-rig created an ideal collection of hues and colours that would normally have required a well- co-ordinated lighting crew. With a giant video screen displaying the most aired `rivet' commercial ever seen, the tour trundled into life, passing through the North American continent in July and August, Japan in October, finishing 1983 in Australia.
Bowie remained sceptical concerning the direction of popular music in the first half of the nineteen-eighties. He considered it to be going through a fatuous stage, hopefully short-lived, indicating there to be an odd nihilistic, albeit romantic, quality to contemporary music, where style was given greater import over content. This was plausibly more so in Europe than America, yet with the advent of cable-linked, twenty-four hour music on television, there was an growing de-valuing of Western music.
Bowie preferred to defer such thoughts on contemporary music by stating that he could only relate to it in a personal sense, being able to discover more resolve in listening to his own musical directive. (Thirteen more hits, before the `Fame' re-issue, in 1990). As many disciples of his work realise, he does tend to vacillate backwards and forwards between exercise and emotional content.
And what was to become of the artist's further musical direction -
Bowie the performer ?
Bowie is an experimentalist first and last. With his intelligence as a writer; sensibility as a humanist; his visual capability as an artist; technique as an actor; his widely obscure political and social beliefs, and his vast knowledge and experience as a musician, it was utterly comprehensible that they would one day meet in a celebration of sound and vision the music world had yet to see.
`I'm very happy with the way those things are turning out, and I'd like to try my hand at something a little more adventurous.'
However, his own impression of where he stood in the world, remained politely unassuming and constant.
He is neither prophet nor Neanderthal, "Just a mortal with potential of a Superman", and he's living on.
`All the basic truths sound so simple and naive, but they are, and there's no getting around it. Being a father makes a hell of a lot of difference. And when you start to see your life through your son's and vice-versa, something makes sense again, when sense might have gone a few years previously. There's a return to...not the good old-fashioned values by any means because I still support `change', but one can harness the energies of being an artist into some kind of positive direction, and my son was instrumental in that happening to me.'
