David Bowie and William Burroughs

Rebel Rebel … detail from a photograph of David Bowie and William Burroughs taken by Terry O'Neill in 1974 and hand-coloured by Bowie. Click for full image. Photograph: Courtesy of The David Bowie Archive 2012. © V&A Images

When Bowie met Burroughs
Trend-setter, impresario, phenomenon: David Bowie has shaped entire subcultures. Jon Savage traces the star's talent for reinvention and his catalytic encounter with William Burroughs

Jon Savage
guradian.co.uk
Saturday 9 March 2013

William Burroughs: The weapon of the Wild Boys is a bowie knife, an 18in bowie knife, did you know that?

David Bowie: An 18in bowie knife … you don't do things by halves do you? No, I didn't know that was their weapon. The name Bowie just appealed to me when I was younger. I was into a kind of heavy philosophy thing when I was 16 years old, and I wanted a truism about cutting through the lies and all that.

On 28 February 1974, Rolling Stone magazine published a remarkable encounter between David Bowie and William Burroughs. Entitled "Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman", the event had been hosted in November 1973 by the American journalist A Craig Copetas. As published it took the form of a Q&A between the writer and the musician that, in retrospect, was an inspired piece of positioning for both parties.

Bowie was then at the zenith of his pop star cycle. Five days before the cover date his single "Rebel Rebel" entered the British charts, where it would peak at No 5.

With its teen address, deep androgyny and dancehall imperative, the song was very much in line with previous Bowie hits such as "John, I'm Only Dancing" and "The Jean Genie". But, although nobody knew it at the time, it would be the last in that sequence. Bowie wasn't a traditional pop star, happy to be known for one sound or idea then to be discarded by a fickle public. That was the Ziggy Stardust storyline, and he was determined to avoid the fate of his fictional alter ego.

Late 1973 saw Bowie at a particular crossroads. Stardom had come hard and fast, after a long apprenticeship. The previous year had seen his breakthrough, with three hit singles and an extraordinarily successful album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. His success pulled into the charts previous albums such as Hunky Dory,Space Oddity and The Man Who Sold the World as new fans delved into his past. He became a kind of impresario, producing hit records for Lou Reed ("Walk on the Wild Side") and Mott the Hoople ("All the Young Dudes") and promoting the most feral rock group then in existence, Iggy and the Stooges.



Ziggymania had begun, but this was something more than stardom. Bowie had become a phenomenon, the kind of performer who comes along once in a generation, and carries the whole culture along in his or her wake. His only rivals – Marc Bolan and Rod Stewart – did not have quite his allure or cutting edge: during this period, Bowie was moving faster and further than the media that was trying to contain him.

And 1973 saw no let-up: he toured America and Japan, travelling back by train through Russia and West Germany. A new album, Aladdin Sane, became his first No 1. It coincided with the peak of fan mania during the group's 61-date UK tour – and, thanks to Pierre La Roche's red and blue "lighting flash" makeup, served up the single most identifiable image of Bowie for fans and the general public alike.



Ziggy was on the point of saturation. Aladdin Sane was released in April. Two months later, New English Library published the novel Glam by Richard Allen – the sixth book in the Skinhead series, the 1970s equivalent of penny dreadfuls. With a tag line that reads "Johnny Holland fights to stay idol of a million fans", the cover shows a young man with a poorly executed red and blue flash down his face.

In June, Bowie decided to kill off Ziggy. It was an inspired piece of timing: the look, culture and attitude he had fostered were in danger of being assimilated and superseded. The trend became known as glam rock: a combination of hard rock, flash, often absurd silver costumes and an attempted, androgynous glamour. By the middle of 1973, the purity and power of Bowie's breakthrough had become dulled by imitation and repetition – the full stupidity of fashion or trend evanescence: here today, gone tomorrow. Diluted elements of his style were all over the pop charts: Sweet, Mud, Alvin Stardust.

By now Bowie was not just a pop star but a culture leader, the focus for several micro-generations of fans, ranging from teens to twenty-something urban sophisticates. And he was looking to push them, and himself, forward into uncharted territory.

So the November meeting with Burroughs was well timed. The author was well known, but not the cult he would later become. He was near the end of his time in London, where he had lived since 1968, and his burst of early 1960s creativity – brought on by the discovery of the cut-up technique – had slowed down. However in 1971 he had published The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead, a nightmarish vision of a future (dated 1988) overrun by "adolescent guerrilla armies of specialised humanoids".

Bowie later stated that he got "the shape and the look of what Ziggy and the Spiders were going to become" from The Wild Boys and from Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film version of A Clockwork Orange (1962): "They were both powerful pieces of work, especially the marauding boy gangs of Burroughs' Wild Boys with their bowie knives. I got straight on to that. I read everything into everything. Everything had to be infinitely symbolic."

The encounter went well. Both parties were equally aware of what they had to offer each other. For Burroughs, who had been publishing ground-breaking books for 20 years without much appreciable financial return, it was association with fame and the music industry, as well as the possible benefits: a wider readership, film hook-ups and more money.

Burroughs had already had a brush with pop: he met Paul McCartney several times in late 1965 and early 66 – having set up a tape studio with Ian Sommerville in McCartney's Montagu Square flat in London's Marylebone – and had been rewarded with a cameo portrait on the cover of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Burroughs was an underground press staple and a counter-cultural influence, not least in the coinage of group names such as the Insect Trust and Steely Dan.



Bowie's needs were less obvious, but nonetheless urgent. Searching for an exit from conventional pop stardom, he needed another way of working and a different kind of public persona. Literary cachet offered the chance of a deeper, wider and more permanent cultural relevance; Burroughs had an impeccable avant-garde reputation and an image that was at once forbidding and forbidden, remote and culturally potent.

Most of all, Burroughs had a technique that would enable Bowie to renew his entire method of writing lyrics and making music. During the early 1960s, Burroughs and his colleague, the painter and writer Brion Gysin, had developed the cut-up as a method of visual and verbal reassembly that was equally applicable to painting, montaged artworks, calligraphy, tape manipulation and the word. It offered, in fact, a whole new way of seeing.

Having read Burroughs' cut-up novel Nova Express to prepare for the interview, Bowie applied the technique to the words and sound of his next album, the darkly dystopian Diamond Dogs – a fusion of Burroughs and George Orwell. The cut-up, as he admitted later, perfectly suited his own fragmented consciousness, and also enabled him to cut through the tangle of expectation and image that threatened to slow him down. It sped everything up.

As well as enhancing the author's fame and credibility, the meeting helped set Bowie's trajectory for the next few years – a series of dazzling physical and artistic changes that would not slow until the early 1980s. Bowie became the pop star as harbinger of the future, at the same time as he injected many of Burroughs' ideas and techniques into the mainstream of popular culture.

Within five years of Ziggy, the punks were enacting The Wild Boys on the streets of Britain – as if to promote and preview an inevitable collapse of society. Many accounts of punk accentuate its social realism, but it also had a very strong science-fiction element – projecting into a conceivable nightmare future. The music developed further the chopped acceleration Bowie had previewed on Diamond Dogs and it continued the dystopian preoccupations of that album.



Few could have foreseen in 1974 a youth culture that took many of its cues from a figure such as Burroughs – but Bowie saw it and helped bring it about. After all, he had been in the audience himself, as a teenager, and he understood the dynamic of public performance with a clarity very few stars have had before or since.

Bowie saw the members of his audience raw and close-up in 1972 and 1973. He knew their strengths and weaknesses, and he relished their diversity. He knew he and they were a kind of mutation, and that empowered him to push himself and his fans as far and fast as they would go. He felt they would follow him, and they did – passing through their own rites of passage to become glam rockers, soul boys, punk and eventually, in 1980, new romantics.

After the demise of the Spiders, Bowie lost some of the closeness he had had with his audience. Foreign tours, elaborate concepts and the deleterious effects of super-stardom meant he would no longer see them in quite the same way. Bowie's interview with Burroughs came at the end of his intimate pop star phase. It projected him into a new set of engagements that saw him become more disengaged, more abstracted – indeed more alien: a trajectory enshrined on film by Nicolas Roeg in The Man Who Fell to Earth. This was deliberate: Bowie had become a leader but, as he had written, the leader is always deserted by his followers. The trick was to withdraw before they deserted you.



Bowie's increasingly remote persona and ever-more radical image and sound changes didn't stop the public from buying his records: although his singles sales dropped from the 1972–3 peak, his albums would all make the top five until the end of the decade. Musically, his hardcore fans would follow him wherever he directed: into SF dystopias, contemporary American soul music, icy krautrock and the ambient instrumentals of Low and Heroes.

His subcultural influence would continue to be strong: in the Soul Boys of 1975 and 1976, with their Jerome Newton hairdos and plastic sandals; and the bizarre, cartoon-like punks who began to emerge from London's outer suburbs in 1976. The most visible of these were given a group name, the Bromley Contingent, and they showed the depth of Bowie's influence in their dress and demeanour.

In the mid 1970s, Siouxsie Sioux lived in Bromley: as Bowie had, she made trips into London, in her case to the Biba building in Kensington High Street. "I was besotted with art deco, art nouveau. That was my escape from humdrum. I think Bowie … had a big part in that. Whoever latched on to them then were that way inclined. The whole thing, not just the music. It aroused something that was dormant, that was causing frustration."

Her friend Steve Severin also lived in Bromley: "Something had to happen. Mainly searching for people with shared interests. I think it was all sparked by Bowie." In 1976, the two friends formed one of the first punk bands, Siouxsie and the Banshees. They were among the most obvious examples of just how deep Bowie's influence had been on this generation – just old enough to be bowled over by his 1972 breakthrough. Bowie turned 30 in January 1977. Just as his followers flooded the media with angry noises and blank poses – in an echo of Diamond Dogs and the Stooges' Raw Power – he was into his next phase with Low, an album of two faces: one side of short, clipped songs with cut-up music and lyrics, and another of longer, atmospheric synthesiser instrumentals. His second album of the year, Heroes, marked the transition to even greater effect.



In doing so, Bowie helped set the electronic style that took over when punk was exhausted: the wave of synthesiser groups, such as the Human League, that became very successful in the early 1980s. Once again, he seemed uncannily in touch with future trends – just like the Beatles had been in the 1960s. But he was no longer involved intimately with youth subcultures, nor did his continued relevance depend on this closeness.

Bowie tackled this directly in a track from the 1980 album Scary Monsters …and Super Creeps. "Teenage Wildlife" imagines "one of the new wave boys/ Same old thing in brand new drag/ Comes sweeping into view, oh ho ho ho ho ho/ As ugly as a teenage millionaire/ Pretending it's a whizz kid world".



The hit single from the album was "Ashes to Ashes", a No 1 record that lyrically appeared to close the cycle that had begun with "Space Oddity", 11 years before. Shot by David Mallett, the ground-breaking video featured Bowie in Pierrot costume walking along a beach with the most florid examples of the latest youth subculture he had inspired: the new romantics, who fused several periods of Bowie – Aladdin Sane, Station to Station, and Low – all at once.



In the same year, Bowie filmed a live appearance for the West German film Christiane F – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, the lightly fictionalised story of a teenage drug addict in Berlin. Bowie was presented at the centre of German youth culture, while the city of Berlin was re-envisioned by the use of a soundtrack that included the ambient instrumentals from Low and Heroes. It was the most popular German film of 1981.



Bowie didn't release a new record for another couple of years, while he freed himself from his contractual obligations to RCA Records and former manager Tony Defries. The singer returned in April 1983 with the No 1 single and album Let's Dance. Bowie was tanned, healthy, seemingly at peace with his demons. It may well mark the "normalisation" of David Bowie – freed to be an individual and an adult.

• The catalogue for the V&A exhibition David Bowie Is is edited by the show's curators, Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/mar/09/david-bowie-william-burroughs

Bowie at the V&A: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/david-bowie-is/

Elsewhere on the blog:

http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/david-bowie-four-faces.html
http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/david-bowie-at-v-again.html
http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/david-bowie-at-v.html
http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/david-bowies-new-single-where-are-we-now.html
http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/david-bowie-ch-ch-changes.html
http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/david-bowie-next-day-review.html
http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/david-bowie-by-those-who-know-him.html
http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/david-bowie-london-boy.html

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #192

Kenny Ball RIP

 

Jazz trumpeter Kenny Ball has died at the age of 82 after suffering from pneumonia, his manager has confirmed.

He was best known as the lead trumpet player in the band Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen in the late 1950s and 1960s and for his regular TV appearances with comic duo Morecambe and Wise.

Ball's manager, Les Squire, said that the musician passed away on the morning of 7 March.

"If he could have been on stage tomorrow, he would have been," he said.

Squire said Ball had been ill for a number of weeks and that he had been holding off on bookings until he was better.

His son Keith has been fronting his father's band at their recent performances and will do so again on Friday at a scheduled concert in Grantham, Lincolnshire that will also feature Acker Bilk, Chris Barber and their respective bands.

Born in Ilford in north-east London, Ball left school at 14 to be a clerk in an advertising agency and started taking trumpet lessons.

He turned professional in 1953, playing with the Sid Phillips and Eric Delaney bands, before forming his own group, Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen, in 1958.

The band had their first hit record, I Love You, Samantha, in 1961. Other successes included Midnight in Moscow, March of the Siamese Children and I Want To Be Like You.

He supported his idol Louis Armstrong in 1968 during his last European tour and played at the wedding reception for the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1981.



Alvin Lee RIP

British rock guitarist Alvin Lee, a member of the band Ten Years After, has died aged 68.

His family announced on his official website that he unexpectedly died on 6 March following complications during routine surgery.

The Nottingham-born musician rose to fame after appearing at the Woodstock festival in 1969.

The band, who had eight Top 40 albums in the UK, had their biggest hit in 1971 with I'd Love To Change the World.

Donna-Lisa Healy: Creative Passions at Bede's World

David Almond

CREATIVE PASSIONS
A CONVERSATION CELEBRATING LITERATURE IN PORTRAITS & WORDS

Bede's World, Jarrow: 9 March 2013 to 31 May 2013

Preview: Friday 8 March

Donna-Lisa Healy's 'Creative Passions' exhibition comprises 44 portraits of authors, poets and playwrights who have a connection with the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle. Donna-Lisa's photographic exhibition captures the diversity of these individuals who engage with this independent space for thinking, conversation and creativity.

For Donna-Lisa, the process is about much more than taking a photograph:

‘This project, more than a year in the making, has been a series of conversations between photographer and sitter. Being engaged with the life of these individuals, if only for a short time, has been a privilege and has had a profound effect upon me. I hope that these portraits reflect the diversity of the life of the Lit & Phil, and go some way to convey the moment, the here and now for the sitters at the time.

The conversations continue to live in this unique institution. It must survive and it must strive to touch everyone in the community.’

Donna-Lisa Healy received her degree in Photography, Video & Digital Imaging at the University of Sunderland in 2006. Her work since then has explored her love of literature, the writers who create it and the relationship between photography and literature. After completing her MA in 2012 Donna-Lisa has gone on to work with a greater number of storytellers, authors and poets and still continues to do so.

The exhibition features photographs of KATE ADIE DAVID ALMOND LINDSAY BALDERSON MAUREEN ALMOND BOB BEAGRIE MELVYN BRAGG CHAZ BRENCHLEY KEVIN CADWALLENDER STEVE CHAMBERS ANN CLEEVES ANDY CROFT MICHAEL CHAPLIN SIMON DONALD ZDENKA FANTLOVA ANNE FINE KATE FOX LINDA FRANCE CATHERINE GRAHAM DESMOND GRAHAM ALASDAIR GRAY ADAM HANSEN CYNTHIA FULLER TOM KELLY KATHLEEN KENNY VALERIE LAWS BILL HERBERT JOAN JOHNSTON LIZ LOCHHEAD MARILYN LONGSTAFF SHEREE MACK JANET MACLEOD TROTTER COLIN MCNAUGHTON VAL MCDERMID MICHAEL GREEN PETER MORTIMER LESLEY MOUNTAIN ALLAN MASSIE LISA MATTHEWS CHRIS MULLIN ELLEN PHETHEAN SUSANNAH PICKERING PAULINE PLUMMER SHEILA QUIGLEY STEVIE RONNIE 

http://www.bedesworld.co.uk/creative-passions-1/

 Tom Kelly

Preview: Friday 8 March 2013

7.05- 7.15 Lisa Matthews is a poet and tutor who has worked at Northumbria and Newcastle universities and has two collections Postcards from a waterless lake from Diamond Twig Press and more recently The deadhunting diaries from the Dogeater Ptress. 

7.15-7.25 Joan Johnston has appeared in many magazines and has been a creative writing tutor throughout the north-east and has had pamphlets from Diamond twig and the collection Orange for the Sun from Dogeater Press and most recently The Dare Devil from Red Squirrel Press. 

7.25-7.35 Kathleen Kenny is a Newcastle based with an Irish lineage. She (like Joan) has been a tutor throughout the area and has collections and pamphlets from publishers including Koo, Flarestack and the collection Hole from Smokestack and more recently from Red Squirrel Keening & Spittal Tongues and Travelling with Eggs. She is at present working on a novel. 

7.35-7.45 Tom Kelly is a Jarrow-born poet & writer, who has recently finished a project with Andrew Hagan documenting and dramatising the lives of workers in the area who worked in the shipyards, Men Of The Tyne, which has just finished a mini-tour to the Gala, Durham, Phoenix at Blyth and Washington Arts Centre. Heis currently working on a project with Andrew Hagan on Consett Made Of Steel, which you can read about here http://www.madeofsteel.co.uk/

7.45- 7.55 Bob Beagrie. A proud of son of Teesside. Bob’s a senior lecturer on the MA at Teesside University and has a number of collections from Mudfog, Biscuit, Cinnamon, Seer Sung Husband from Smokestack Books, Glass Characters from Red Squirrel and his most recent collaboration Kids with his fellow Teesside writer Andy Willoughby. 

During the three month exhibition Hive Radio will record 24 poems by all 24 participating poets which will then be added to the exhibition throughout the three months until Friday 31st May, giving yet more insight into the inspiration behind the portraits.

http://hiveradiouk.wordpress.com/

http://www.source.ie/graduate/2012/univsundma/univsundma_student_15_58_48_03-09-12/univsundma_student_15_58_48_03-09-12.php

Fergie Babes

Last night's set lists

At The Habit, York: -

Set 1: -
Long May You Run
Human Highway
I Don't Want To Talk About It
Mind Your own Business

Set 2: -
Falling*
Tell Me Why
Till There was You

Set 3: -
Out On The Weekend
Harvest Moon

A quiet night with only a few players, hence the 3 sets. Bizarrely the main proceedings were filmed by some students from the Uni; in addition sketches were made of each performer: the intention is to make beer mats (!!!!) from the sketches so watch this space.

* Andy, the lad who has covered this song a couple of times in The Habit, invited me to accompany him singing it - so I put on a harmony or two.

Set 3 - to close the night, our wonderful host for the evening, Sam Forrest (Mark Wynn being on tour) struck up with the intro to Out On The Weekend, so I grabbed my A-harp and added the harmonica part. Also strummed along to Harvest Moon to end the show.

A most enjoyable evening.

Pat Ffrench and The Orchid House Project: Born to Fly...

Out now on iTunes

http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/stat?id=eH8NOY8fBFE&offerid=78941&type=3&subid=0&tmpid=1826&RD_PARM1=http%253A%252F%252Fphobos.apple.com%252FWebObjects%252FMZStore.woa%252Fwa%252FviewAlbum%253Fid%253D611304157%2526s%253D143441%2526partnerId%253D30"> height="15" width="61" alt="The Orchid House Project - Born to Fly" src="http://www.tunecore.com/images/buttons/badgeitunes61x15dark.gif" />

Paul Williams - Still Alive

David Bowie - The Next Day review

David Bowie: The Next Day – review
David Bowie's eagerly awaited new album is thought-provoking, strange and filled with great songs

Alexis Petridis

guardian.co.uk

Monday 25 February 2013

When David Bowie chose to break a decade's silence by releasing a single, Where Are We Now?, on his 66th birthday, dissenting voices were hard to find amid the clamour made by people eager to welcome him back. Some argued that the clamour was part of the problem: it drowned out the music, which perhaps wasn't worthy of the noisy excitement it had caused. The reason people were so thrilled Bowie was back, they suggested, was founded in the music he made in the 1970s, a decade when almost every new album he released was an astonishingly sure-footed leap forward into uncharted territory. But Where Are We Now? was no Heroes or Sound and Vision. Rather, it was a charming, fragile ballad. Indeed, it was not unlike the stuff he had been knocking out immediately before his retirement, when – presumably burned by the mixed response to his spirited 1990s attempts to seize the zeitgeist or dabble in the avant garde in the way he'd done so effortlessly two decades previously – Bowie settled on a more straightforward and comfortable kind of classicism. Had Where Are We Now? been released in 2004, they suggested, its reception would have been far more muted. People were welcoming back an exhilarating, distant memory of Bowie, rather than the reality.

hey had a point, but Where Are We Now? still carried with it some intriguing possibilities for the subsequent album. The song found Bowie drifting nostalgically around his former adopted hometown, Berlin, suggesting that The Next Day might be that rarest of things, an autobiographical work from an artist whose nakedly autobiographical songs can be numbered on the fingers of one hand. Such speculation was bolstered by the self-referential artwork of both the single and album: the former offering an inverted photo of a skeletal Bowie onstage in 1974, the latter featuring the cover of 1977's Heroes with the title redacted and a white square covering the famous image of the singer in a pose modelled on a painting by Erich Heckel. Perhaps, came the excited suggestion, Bowie had spent the past decade ruminating on his past and was now issuing an album in lieu of a memoir.

Perhaps not. There are certainly a smattering of knowing sonic references to Bowie's past works. If You Can See Me features the eerie sped-up vocal effect found on 1970's After All and the climax of Hunky Dory's The Bewlay Brothers, while You Feel So Lonely You Could Die ends with a reprise of the drum beat that introduced Five Years, the opening track of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. And there are moments when you wonder whether some of the characters in The Next Day's songs aren't founded in personal experience: certainly, the protagonist of Love Is Lost – appointed "the voice of youth", marooned abroad, cosseted by luxury but fearful and paranoid, "thinking like mad" – feels remarkably like a pen portrait of the poor, cocaine-ravaged soul in that inverted photo. But elsewhere The Next Day offers what you might call an index of Bowiean obsessions.

In the first 10 minutes alone, you get the terror of life in a dystopian dictatorship teetering on the brink of apocalypse; a feral gang of vaguely homoerotic juvenile delinquents smashing things up; the numbing isolation of stardom and the suggestion that stars themselves may actually be some kind of alien lifeforms "soaking up our primitive world". The mutual respect between Bowie and Scott Walker is well-documented – an effusive 50th birthday tribute from the elusive former Scott Engel famously reduced Bowie to tears live on Radio 1 – and it's Walker's latterday work that much of The Next Day resembles, at least in that the lyrics are so dense and allusive you occasionally feel in need of a set of York Notes to get through them.

The present writer spent an alternately illuminating and rather trying few hours attempting to unpick the lyrics of I'd Rather Be High. Perhaps the mention of "Clare and Lady Manners" drinking and gossiping about politics during wartime was a reference to The Coterie, the 1910s' equivalent of the subsequent decade's bright young things – its male membership ultimately decimated in the trenches – in which Lady Diana Manners played a leading role. Or perhaps it was a reference to Officers and Gentlemen, the second novel in Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, in which a character based on Lady Diana Cooper (nee Manners) attempts to pull strings for Ivor Clare, a character facing desertion charges. That seems more likely – amid the subsequent lyrical references to the futility of conflict, there's a mention of Egypt, where Officers and Gentlemen is partially set – in which case, the song's overall message might be summarised as: Waugh – huh! – what is it good for? But what does Officers and Gentlemen – or, for that matter, The Coterie – have to do with the opening line's reference to Vladimir Nabokov's life in 1920s and 30s Berlin? Pausing only to wonder whether there's a certain cultural richness here that you just don't find in, say, the oeuvre of the Vaccines, or whether Bowie has earned himself the exalted position where one takes for cultural richness the kind of thing you'd ordinarily dismiss as agonising pretention – and to note that either is deeply impressive – the present writer gave up and decided to just enjoy the music.

This, it has to be said, is a relative doddle. Producer Tony Visconti has suggested that The Next Day is of a piece with 1979's Lodger and, as on that record, Bowie spends a lot of The Next Day experimenting with his vocal delivery, offering, among other things, a peculiar nasal drone on the title track and a doomy, tortured lowing that recalls Walker – him again – on the closing Heat. The dense web of screaming feedback that ends Where Does the Grass Grow? recalls the climax of Boys Keep Swinging, while the fantastic If You Can See Me has some of the relentless propulsion of Move On, although it's perhaps worth noting that the latter track was about the joyous freedom of travel, while the characters here are unable to escape the shadowy forces controlling their lives however far they run: "if you can see me, I can see you," reiterates the chorus, Big Brother-ishly. That aside, the comparison with Lodger might be pitching it a bit high. It's perhaps the least well-regarded album of original material Bowie released in the 70s, but that tells you more about the astonishing quality of the records that preceded it than it does Lodger itself. If there are some intriguing musical decisions on The Next Day – the honking baritone sax that gives the feral gang of Dirty Boys a curiously lurching, ungainly gait; the vocal rendering of the Shadows' Apache that constitutes Where Does the Grass Grow?'s hook, the ominous, fretless-bass-decorated shudder of Heat – there's none of Lodger's unfettered experimentalism, nothing as authentically bizarre asYassassin or African Night Flight.

What The Next Day has that perhaps Lodger didn't is something more prosaic. Whatever else he's been doing, clearly at least some of the last decade has been spent carefully crafting inarguable tunes. Its melody shifting from weary sigh to frantic angst, I'd Rather Be High is utterly beautiful; The Stars (Are Out Tonight) supports its Brad-Pitt-is-an-alien thesis with a fantastic chorus, all the more potent for the fact that it takes an age to arrive; Valentine's Day is so deceptively sweet that the bleakness of its subject matter – another tyrant, bent on crushing the world beneath his heels – doesn't initially register.

Despite the lyrical density, The Next Day's success rests on simple pleasures, not a phrase you'd ever use to describe Lodger or Station to Station. You could argue that means the naysayers still have a point. For all the pointers it offers in that direction, The Next Day isn't the equal of Bowie's 70s work: but then, the man himself might reasonably argue, what is? Perhaps it's destined to be remembered more for the unexpected manner in which it was announced than its contents. That doesn't seem a fair fate for an album that's thought-provoking, strange and filled with great songs. Listening to The Next Day makes you hope it's not a one-off, that his return continues apace: no mean feat, given that listening to a new album by most of his peers makes you wish they'd stick to playing the greatest hits.

• The Next Day is released on 11 March

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/feb/25/david-bowie-next-day-review?INTCMP=SRCH

Garth Hudson - Cash in the Attic?

Last waltz for Garth Hudson's possessions
Landlord sells Ex-The Band member's stuff

By John Sullivan
Times Herald-Record
Published: 2:00 AM - 02/25/13

Kingston — Friends and fans of Garth Hudson rallied this weekend to buy up the famed musician's possessions before they were lost to posterity at a garage sale in Kingston.

A Kingston landlord decided to get rid of the famous musician's belongings, kept in an artist's loft rented for storage.

Mike Piazza, the owner of the loft, said Hudson failed to pay rent on the space for about seven years.

The items in Hudson's possession ranged from personal belongings and household items to boxes of handwritten sheet music. They took up a 2,000-square-foot loft at the Shirt Factory on Cornell Street, before being reduced and moved twice, the most recent move to the Pajama Factory on Iwo Jima Lane and Cedar Street. That's where Piazza began selling off Hudson's household and personal items this past weekend.

"It was everything, his entire life," Piazza said. He advertised the sale locally.

Hudson, the organist, keyboardist and saxophone player for the rock group The Band, moved the belongings to the Shirt Factory in 2002 just before losing his home to foreclosure. He has gone bankrupt several times.

About six months after the move, the rent checks ceased, requiring Piazza to track Hudson's representatives down in Hudson's native Canada, and on both U.S. coasts. Piazza managed to squeeze some sporadic rent payments from Hudson's representatives and from Hudson himself, but it didn't last. Over 11 years, the unpaid bill totalled $60,000 to $70,000, Piazza said.

The landlord made attempts to partner with Hudson, as well as his band mates Levon Helm of Woodstock, the drummer for The Band who died last year, and Robbie Robertson, the other surviving member of the original group, to sell off the items as a fundraiser. None of those band members showed an interest, he said. Piazza then received offers from the reality Cable TV show, American Pickers, but the show's producers stopped calling when attempts to reach Hudson's lawyers to get permission for the show failed.

Piazza's advertisement for the garage sale this weekend apparently caught the eye of Hudson or someone he knew.

Hudson's Facebook page and Twitter feed began offering reimbursements to anyone who purchased the items at the sale, which took place from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on both days. The Twitter feed added Hudson just turned 75 and "plans to begin touring with his band for the first time in his life. Let's help keep Garth on his mission of music."

A friend of Hudson's who reached out to Hudson and his wife, singer Maud Hudson, over the weekend said neither wanted to be interviewed about the matter.

Piazza said he began receiving a flood of calls from the musician's supporters, who also stopped by the garage sale on the weekend to tell him personally what they thought of him.

"We're all going to go to the same place (after death), except you," one of the discouraged fans told Piazza, he said.

Piazza said it was either sell off the items or lose rent.

Piazza said he came upon signs of both genius and problems while going through the musician's belongings. Amid the boxes and boxes of meticulously labeled sheet music, CDs and old records, the landlord also found boxes of dusty, unopened junk mail and uncashed checks, including one for $26,000 from EMI Records issued in 1979.

"He's kind of out there," the landlord said,

Also in the pile of paperwork were thousands of letters from fans who thanked Hudson for staying as their guest during his many years of touring around the world.

Piazza has already agreed to sell off the music-related items with an online auction company on April 1, he said. On Saturday, he sold the musician's household items and personal belongings to a woman for just a few thousand dollars. The woman appeared to be buying up the items to return to Hudson, he said.

"My intent was just to get rid of it," he said. "I'm a real estate person, not a collector."

http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F20130225%2FNEWS%2F302250324

Auction halted, Garth Hudson asks court to create trust

John W. Barry
1 March 2013

A state Supreme Court judge in Ulster County has issued a temporary order preventing the auction of historic musical items owned by Garth Hudson, an Ulster County resident and member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with The Band.

Acting state Supeme Court Justice Mary Work today issued a temporary restraining order preventing the sale of Hudson's items — instruments, music books, sheet music and tape recordings among them — in advance of a scheduled April 6 auction in Kingston. Hudson's items had been in a Kingston storage unit owned by Mike Piazza, who arranged for their auction after, he said, Hudson failed to pay tens of thousands of dollars in rental fees.

Now, all sides, including Jay Werbalowsky, who runs JMW Auction Gallery, are due in state Supreme Court in Kingston Thursday. Hudson and his wife, Maud, have asked the court to place Hudson's items in a trust and, in the meantime, prevent the sale of the items.

In court papers, the Hudsons accuse Piazza of extortion and selling valuable items, including a pump organ, along with theft and breach of contract.

According to court papers, the Hudsons during the summer of 2004 entered into a two-year lease agreement with Piazza's Crossfield Management for warehouse space at 77 Cornell St. in Kingston. Furniture, rare books, household and personal items, instruments, sheet music, albums and memorabilia from Hudson's musical career — performing with The Hawks, The Band and musicians including Bob Dylan — were stored in Piazza's space.

In the court papers, the Hudsons accuse Piazza of falsely claming they owed $14,000 in rent. Representatives of the Hudsons offered to pay $11,000, Piazza refused, denied a request to return the items and instead demanded $50,000, according to court papers.

The Hudsons also accused Piazza of having "pilfered" the items and placing them for sale on eBay, the online auction site, according to court papers. In 2012, the Hudsons say in court papers, Piazza demanded back rental fees of $17,880. A representative of the Hudsons attempted to resolve the dispute and Piazza demanded $75,000 before returning any of the items, according to court papers.

The Hudsons also say in court papers that Piazza moved their items without permission and as a result, caused damage. The most recent developments came when Piazza offered the items for sale last weekend, which set the stage for next month's auction.

http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20130301/ENT04/130301015/Auction-halted-Garth-Hudson-asks-court-create-trust?nclick_check=1

David Bowie - by those who know him...

David Bowie and me
As Bowie releases his first album in 10 years, we find out what he's really like from friends, lovers, bandmates… and the man who directed him in SpongeBob SquarePants

Dave Simpson
guardian.co.uk

Saturday 23 February 2013


George Underwood, artist and lifelong friend

I met David when we were both nine, enrolling for St Mary's boy scouts in Bromley. Even then he'd go in and out of things quickly: skiffle, hairstyles.

When we formed the King Bees, he wrote to John Bloom, the Richard Branson of his time, saying, "Brian Epstein's got the Beatles. You need us." Anyone who's got the guts to do that isn't going to worry about dressing up as Ziggy Stardust.

At school, this kid, Brian Gill, had big sideburns and the headmaster told him to shave them off. Brian told him to "fuck off" and quit school. David was full of admiration and later it seeped into the "Weird and Gilly" line in Ziggy Stardust. And Jean Genie was from Jean Genet – I was strumming this John Lee Hooker riff on a bus and David said, "Pass the guitar over here", reworked the riff and wrote Jean Genie just like that.

He took my wife and me on the QE2 when Ziggy went to America, and went to dinner in a Ziggy catsuit. After that, he wouldn't come out of his cabin. He said, "They were all looking at me." I said, "What do you expect?" Another time, he came out of the bathroom and he'd shaved off his eyebrows.

He's an emotional, passionate person who put everything into the music. I've seen him in the studio burst out crying after finishing a song – Life On Mars springs to mind. After some gigs, he'd say, "The audience were a bit quiet." I'd say, "David, they're staring at you with their mouths open."

He had created this fierce storm, but he was the only one in it. He felt as if everyone was feeding off him, like leeches. To me, he's always been the same. I don't see enough of him now. It's mainly email, but he once said to me, "George, I might not see you for five years, but it doesn't matter."

We fell out once, when we were 15. David told me a date of mine had cancelled, so she waited for an hour. I punched him. A week later, my dad said, "You never told me you hit David Jones." It turned out he'd been rushed to hospital and almost lost the sight in his eye. Instead, it turned a different colour. Years later he said, "You did me a favour." People wrote to him saying, "I'm from the same planet as you, man, and it ain't Earth."

Ken Scott, produced several early Bowie albums

When David gets into a character, he gets into it 110%, for good and bad. When the drugs kicked in, he didn't start slowly: he was up and running. With each one, he became the character he was trying to portray.

I've heard so many interpretations of that song The Bewlay Brothers – supposedly about his brother, Terry. He told me, "You won't understand the lyrics. I wrote it for the American market. They'll read so much into anything you give them." You never quite knew when he was being honest. It's not something I realised at the time, but seeing various different explanations in interviews of something I'd know about, I'd think, "Ah, so that's what you're like!"

I always email him on his birthday, to remind him he's four months older than me.

Dana Gillespie, singer and teenage squeeze

I met David in 1962 when he played the Marquee. I was brushing my hair and he took the brush and carried on brushing. He asked if he could stay at my home – a way of saying he'd missed the last train. I had a single bed, so it was a tight squeeze. I introduced him to my parents the next morning. His hair was so long, they thought he was a girl.

People were interested in me because of how I looked – tits, skirt up to here – but David carried my ballet shoes, taught me guitar and was very encouraging. I visited his parents. I'd never been into a working-class household, where people sat in silence glued to the television set. His brother was in the mental hospital and we went to see him. One time David said, "Whatever I do, I want to get out of here. I do not want to live like this."

We had a fling, but not really a love affair. One day he said, "I'd like you to meet somebody," and that was Angie Bowie. One of the biographies says we were lesbians together, but we were just good mates. David was cool, calm, collected and cold, but after Angie had Zowie, she went to Italy with me and David was on the phone every day saying, "I miss you. Come back," so there is emotion there.

When he fell out with the management company, he fled to Berlin. It's sad when your best pals are too damaged to speak to you. I met [guitarist] Mick Ronson years later and he said, "David doesn't speak to me." I don't think he wanted to face up to the hurt he'd caused by breaking up the Spiders From Mars, but he needed American musicians to do something different.

Lindsay Kemp, taught Bowie dance and mime

In 1967, a mutual friend told me about David and gave me his first album. I fell in love with his plaintive voice. I played When I Live My Dream before a show in London, and David was flattered, came backstage and fell in love with my world. He started dance classes with me the next day.

He often arrived for classes bleary-eyed, but was a very diligent student. I taught him to dance and mime. We both liked silent films – he'd impersonate Laurel and Hardy. I never saw David's hard, ambitious side. He was always gentle.

We toured together in a theatrical show called Pierrot In Turquoise. It was love at first sight for me, but I found out he was seeing a dear friend of mine, Natasha Korniloff, the show's costume designer, at the same time as having an affair with me. Of course I wasn't the only love in his life. There were scores, even then. When the tour reached Whitehaven, I heard noises through the wall: it was David and Natasha, who hadn't known I was seeing David. After that, he couldn't go to Natasha's bed and he certainly couldn't go to mine, so he spent three nights sleeping in a chair, the tortured martyr. I drank a bottle of whiskey and rode my bicycle into the sea, but the water was so cold I staggered back to the theatre and cut my wrist. They found me slumped on the floor. A few hours after being taken to hospital, I was on stage, blood seeping through my Pierrot costume – a fabulous dramatic effect, but I'd been desperately in love.

Three years later, Angela [Bowie] told me David wanted me to direct theZiggy Stardust show at the Rainbow. After that, I saw him very rarely, the last time in Bologna about 15 years ago. He kept me waiting for hours and was surrounded by heavies. He seemed very detached, like an alien. I didn't feel comfortable, but I'd love to see him again.

"Whispering" Bob Harris, DJ and friend in Bowie's early days

I first saw David in a folky act called Feathers. He was very polite and surprisingly "English". A couple of years earlier, he'd been interviewed when he'd founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men, but he'd just had a short back and sides for a bit part in a film.

It was a fantastic, creative time. I lived with a mobile DJ and he'd double-booked himself, so I took David with me to a college gig. I introduced him, he played Space Oddity and they started slow handclapping. I was so angry I took the microphone and said, "Remember this name: David Bowie. He's going to be a star and you'll remember the day you booed him off stage."

Even then it struck me that while the surface David was very warm and exciting, he was closed off. He went behind some kind of mask: the make-up, the Lindsay Kemp mime thing. I counted him as one of the closest people in my life, but once he became successful, he was unreachable. I think to get to that level of stardom, you've got to have a very high degree of self-absorption. Recently, when I was involved with the Sound & Vision charity for Cancer Research, David immediately donated something. He can be very distant, but on this occasion he really wasn't.


Mick "Woody" Woodmansey, Spiders From Mars drummer

When we met, he was wearing red trousers, red shoes with blue stars, a rainbow T-shirt and bangles. In Hull, where I'm from, even the girls didn't wear bracelets. I saw him in the Man Who Sold The World dress once. He said it was a man's dress. When he announced he was gay, we were all surprised. Angie was bisexual, but I never saw any evidence of it with David. But he was very good at creating in the moment. If he ever had an idea and we said, "We're not doing that," he'd push it until we did.

When we lived together in Beckenham, I never saw him do any household tasks and he wasn't mechanically minded. His car, a Riley, was his pride and joy. He once left it in gear, turned the starting handle and it ran him over.

There was a lot of pressure on him. We went on holiday to Cyprus and the plane got hit by lightning. He went white and fainted. He was so emaciated from the hard work, you could see the veins on his face. He didn't fly after that.

In the early days, we'd have a laugh, go clubbing, but later on it became apparent that he'd gone into character. You'd come off stage and he'd do interviews as Ziggy – you'd be sat in a taxi with this alien. You'd ask a question and he'd look right through you. He had turned into Ziggy Stardust.

 
Ng, starred in the China Girl video

Acting opposite David was terrifying, because he had a long history as a performer and I was a model and waitress. And in the storyline we were meant to be intimate. The first album I'd ever bought was Ziggy Stardust and I owned all his others, so it was overawing, but he was really generous as a performer. There's a scene where I sit up suddenly, as if woken from a dream, and David leaps on top of me, and I sat up and gave him a full Liverpool kiss in the face. "Oh my God, I've just killed David Bowie!" But he laughed and said, "I've got a hard head."

He was unfailingly polite, charming and a gentleman. For us to act as boyfriend and girlfriend, we did the obvious thing in Sydney – purely as method acting. After the shoot, I got a call: "Do you want to come to Europe with me?" I became a bit of a groupie for two weeks. I knew it was a passing phase. I was 23, we lived in different worlds, but he gave me an experience that I'll never forget. We were whisked out of back doors of hotels, flying in private jets, David hiding from fans under a rug in the limousine. It was like being in the movies.

Toni Basil, choreographed the Diamond Dogs and Glass Spider tours

David has the greatest work ethic. Other performers freak out and get unpleasant, but he has incredible fortitude. He had a fear of heights, but it didn't stop him. He got in a cherry picker for Space Oddity, and managed to sing and dance. He's very funny. He's a fabulous actor. He knows what he's capable of, and will suss it out and research it. And he's drop-dead gorgeous. He'd have made a great James Bond.
Julien Temple, directed Bowie in pop videos and Absolute Beginners

He asked me to do the Jazzin' For Blue Jean video. He had a funny perspective on rock stardom and wanted to take the piss out of himself, portraying a side of himself he'd kept hidden. It was risky, because part of Bowie's power is mystique. One minute he'd be walking down Frith Street with people open-mouthed, touching him, then I'd be walking next to a very normal bloke. He took me to West End dive bars that had been there since the 60s, and everyone knew him from the old days.

I'm not sure how happy he is with fame and I think the 70s character roles were a way of dealing with it, in the same way Keith Richards became a junkie. There is a normal version of David, but I've seen him before he goes on stage and he somehow has the ability to will himself into something magnetic and incandescent.

Roger Taylor, Queen drummer

I got to know David when he was living in Switzerland. He was the most charming man, probably one of the most talented, charismatic people I've ever been involved with: great company, very funny and a brilliantly dangerous mind – interesting dark corners. I haven't seen him for years. I probably shouldn't say this but – ha! – I remember him saying he was quite annoyed that the Spiders wouldn't cut off their mullets.

Sterling Campbell, drummer

David doesn't talk down to you – he makes you feel like an equal. But I didn't meet Ziggy. I met him in another place. Working with David, there's a lot of comedy. He was the first person to turn me on to The Office. He was getting it sent from England. He's an extremely funny man. There'll be an ongoing joke at dinner, or on stage he might be going up on the catwalk and, when no one can see, he'll turn round and make a really funny face.

Tony Selznick, taught Bowie to roller-skate for the Day-In Day-Out video

David came across as very humble and in between careers, almost. He was disillusioned with the music industry. I taught him to skate in a parking lot. We shot the video on Hollywood Boulevard at night, with me in a wig and leather jacket as his double for some scenes. The only bad fall involved the instructor: my wheels came off, I was bleeding everywhere, and David helped me clean up. He was so nice, normal. A couple of years later I was driving down Sunset and he pulled up alongside. I rolled down the window and he was really approachable, just like any other dad in a Lexus.

Adrian Belew, guitarist

David knows so much, the conversation never gets dull. When I first worked with him in the late 1970s, I was a naive youngster from Kentucky and he was like a mentor to me. One time, we went to the Prado in Madrid and he amazed me with his knowledge of paintings and painters. He knew all this wonderful trivia that made my museum visit so much more interesting. David Bowie as museum tour guide! I tipped him at the end.

On the 1990 Sound And Vision tour, he was much less guarded and seemed to want to be the person diving in the pool with everyone else. We both had girl problems, so would sob on each other's shoulders, but that tour was a life-changer for us both. I met my wife. On the plane he was looking through magazines and I heard him say to his assistant, "This girl's interesting." That was Iman. After the tour, I heard they were dating, and the rest is history.

Tim Pope, video director

I'd become friends with Iggy Pop and at one show he said, "I've got a couple of friends joining us." I look around and it's Bowie and Jagger. We went to this restaurant and when Iggy went for a pee, there was a space between us. He turned to me and said "Tim Pope. You're a funny little arsehole, aren't you?" and I went, "Yeah, David Bowie, and you're a complete…" I won't say the word. And that was the start of a beautiful relationship.

He's incredibly physically strong, a muscly bloke, not a willowy thing. In one shot we tied a camera to him and if he had fallen over, it would have broken his back. He has a real commitment.

I worked with him for 15 years. For some reason I brought out this character I called the Guv, who was like a London cab driver. There's the legend, but he has that person in him.

I was once in a studio with him and Lou Reed, and I saw them in the kitchen and just had to sneak in to hear what they were talking about. Lou was saying that he was going to Africa and David said, "The thing is, you go to these places and you forget the climate's changed. I bought a bowl and by the time I got home it had cracked." It was the least esoteric conversation I could imagine between Lou Reed and David Bowie.


Paul Tibbitt, recruited Bowie to provide a voice for animated TV series SpongeBob SquarePants

We asked David if he would be interested in voicing Lord Royal Highness. He jumped at the chance, because he and his daughter watched SpongeBob together. I flew to New York to direct him. Who in their right mind would pass up that opportunity? The next day on his blog he called the job "the Holy Grail of animation gigs". Needless to say, that made my year.

Édouard Lock, choreographer and artistic director on world tours

I got to know David quite well, but there is a reserve, a part that isn't for public consumption and doesn't get revealed – or perhaps it does to people who know him much more than I do.

When he was feeling social, it almost felt like a triangle: you, him and this thing he wanted to talk about. He was fascinating and wanted to share his knowledge and educate. He liked logic, thought puzzles, memory stuff. The non-serious side to him came out when things seemed tense.

I don't know if performing changed him. I think he went through what he had to to get at those performances. It's partly losing your anonymity and also going into the most uncomfortable places in your psyche.

Kenneth Pitt, manager from 1966 to 1970

He had this marvellous way of bringing one of his legs up under him and rocking backwards and forwards, and he was doing this while we were working out what to do, and he got dreadfully excited. Then I had to live up to his excitement. We made life-size models of the Beatles, which he used for publicity. That didn't last long. We were walking down Baker Street with them and who should approach us but one of the Beatles?

He used to rehearse late at night at home and because they lived in a tiny house, it was very bad for his father, who wasn't well. David told me this and I said, "I think you'd better move in here," and he burst into tears, saying, "May I? Really?" He lived at my place for about two years. My clothes were his clothes. I took a lot of pictures of him and there's one where he's wearing my lumber jacket and I just knew he was going to make it. He was very polite – splendid, really.

When Angie and David came to tell me they were firing me, he sat looking at the wall and again there were tears in his eyes. I'm 90 now and hadn't seen him for years, but about four years ago there was a knock at my door and it was David. He didn't seem too well, but we talked for over an hour. It was a lovely thing to do.

Geoff MacCormack, lifelong friend

David is a too-far person. He doesn't drink any more because he took that too far. He lives a very clean life now, but I'm sure he's obsessing about something else. When he moved to Switzerland for a while he started skiing. I remember thinking, "Bowie? Skiing?!"

But he's a very normal, gracious person. People are surprised by that. When we went to the Museum of Modern Art, his instinct was to queue with everyone else. I saw him recently and it was the same old in-jokes, slight competitiveness on silly things. We went bowling with Iman and his daughter. Iman found it hilarious that we were so competitive. He's got the time and money now to watch his child grow up, which he didn't have with Duncan [Zowie], so he's taking time to be a family man, walking around New York in a flat cap.

Ricky Gardiner, guitarist during the Berlin period

I remember David as being extremely well-read in the areas that interested him. His apartment had a well-stocked library on astrology, UFOs, oriental music and psychic phenomena. Nearby, there were bullet holes in the walls and David took us to a place where they ran the Nazi propaganda films 24/7. We rehearsed at the old UFA studios, where those films were made, and one could see guards pacing the wall at Hansa studios. The atmosphere was laden with the resonance of the war. We stayed at the old Schlosshotel Gerhus, and one night we happened on this Nazi commemorative event. We must have seemed as odd to them as they did to us, in their Nazi regalia, dancing in formation like dummies.

David's new single, Where Are We Now?, is just beautiful, and retrospectively captures the sentiments we felt then, which were not easy to express at the time. He was very spontaneous. Always Crashing In The Same Car is about him crashing his Mercedes in the hotel garage.


Mike Garson, keyboards, Bowie's longest-serving musician

I was hired in 1972 for eight weeks, and for the next two years he had five different bands, all of whom were fired or left except me. Then, around 1975, after we'd finished the Young Americans tour, I was visiting him in New York and he said, "Mike, you're going to be with me for the next 20 years." And I don't hear from him for 17 years. He gets on the phone in 1992 and asks me back for Black Tie, White Noise, and I stay for more albums and tours than I can remember.

I've seen him joyous over something he's created and other times, just before going on stage, [full of] nerves and fear and vulnerability. When he played Glastonbury to 100,000 people, he sent me out first, to test the waters. He once told me, "You wouldn't want to be in my shoes," about fame and what it does to you. I don't think he cares about the spotlight as much as people think.

After [his heart attack in 2004], I did the first performance with him and Alicia Keys. He said, "Thank you. If I hadn't done this and got over the fear, I might not have been able to sing again."

David has an extraordinary gift, but he's basically a normal guy. We're friends, but he's an isolated person. With most big stars, the vanity and the power and the money take over. Maybe he's experienced that and didn't like that feeling.

Sometimes, others get left in the dust, but one always has the opportunity to fix that. We've never discussed this, but I could feel an undercurrent of regret. He did fix it with Mick Ronson before Mick's death. In his own way, he does repair it. Underneath all the crap you read in books, David is a good guy.

Zachary Alford, drummer on recent tours and albums, including the forthcoming The Next Day

When I met David, I was starstruck. Our eyes met and I had to look down. But he puts you at ease. This wasn't the version of him you hear about, high on cocaine. I felt safe. If you're not partying, you have interesting conversations, usually around art or history. I was reading Roman Life In The Days Of Cicero, which he found interesting, but we could as soon be talking about Peter Cook or Spike Milligan. Until recently I hadn't seen him in a decade. He called and asked, "Are you available? I can't say what it's about." When we got together, I was amazed how good he looked, because I'd seen pictures of him. He's stopped smoking. He works out. He looks better than he has in 15 years. When I heard Where Are We Now? I cried. It was a mixture of happiness that it was being released, that it sounded gorgeous, and hearing this vulnerability in a person that I know and think of as almost superhuman.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/feb/23/david-bowie-and-me?INTCMP=SRCH

Dale Robertson RIP

Dale Robertson as Jim Hardie in the TV series Tales of Wells Fargo, which ran for four years from 1957.

 

In Hollywood, in the days when men were men, Dale Robertson, who has died aged 89, was considered the epitome of masculinity. In the Clarion Call episode from O Henry's Full House (1952), a giggling, snivelling crook, played by Richard Widmark, whom Robertson, a cop, has come to arrest, keeps calling him "the beeg man". Robertson, an ex-prize fighter, was indeed "beeg" – tall, well-built and ruggedly handsome, with a gravelly voice. He was tough but fair to men, and courteous to ladies, particularly in the many westerns in which he starred in the 1950s, and in his most famous role, that of special investigator Jim Hardie in the TV series Tales of Wells Fargo.

 

As the movie western declined in the late 1950s, Robertson found his niche in westerns for TV, such as Tales of Wells Fargo, which ran for four years from 1957. The stories revolved around Robertson as troubleshooter for the pioneering transport company. Not always the most animated of actors, Robertson was effective as a stolid, taciturn type, often letting his left-handed gun speak for him. His other long-running series was Iron Horse (1966-68), in which he was a gambler turned railway baron.

 

In the 60s, Robertson returned to the big screen in a few B westerns, and starred in the British-made Coast of Skeletons (1964) as a US tycoon whose African diamond operation is being investigated by Richard Todd. However, most of his later appearances were on TV, in series such as Death Valley Days, and as a guest on Love Boat, Murder She Wrote, Dallas and Dynasty, while he lived in semi-retirement at his ranch in Oklahoma.

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #191