David Bowie: Five Years

This programme contains some strong language.

-Where are we going?

-We're going down this way.

Can you get me a Coca-Cola for Mr Bowie, please?

'I'm only using rock 'n' roll as a medium.

'I don't think it had been really voiced before then.

'I wanted to be the instigator of new ideas.

'I wanted to turn people on to new things and new perspectives.

'I always wanted to be that sort of catalystic kind of thing.'

I mean, the image you have has got almost nothing to do

with your real life.

'It depends on which image you're talking about.

'I've seen so many because, of course, there will be so many.'

It's like looking at an actor's films

and taking clippings from the films and saying, "Here he is," you know.

Well, that's where you're different from most rock stars.

Well, I'm not a rock star, you see. You've just said it.

-I'm not in rock and roll.

-That's nice.

MUSIC: "Fashion" by David Bowie

# Fashion!

# Turn to the left

# Fashion!

# Turn to the right

# Oooh, fashion!

# We are the goon squad And we're coming to town

# Beep-beep. #

I've always found that I collect. I am a collector.

And I've always just seemed to collect personalities, ideas.

# Let's dance

# Put on your red shoes and dance the blues... #

I'm a storyteller and I'm a storywriter

and I decided that I preferred to enact a lot of the material

I was writing, rather than perform it as myself.

# There's a starman

# Waiting in the sky

# There's a starman

# Waiting in the sky. #

I think I'm a fairly good social observer,

and I think that I encapsulate areas maybe every year or so.

I'm trying to stamp that down somewhere,

the quintessence of that year.

MUSIC: "Oh You Pretty Things" by David Bowie

# Let me make it plain

# Gotta make way For the Homo Superior. #

'I wanted to make a mark and I didn't quite know how to do it,

'and it took me all the '60s to try everything that I could think of

'in terms of theatre and arts and music,

'to find out what exactly it was I wanted to do anyway.

'I was learning about how to play rhythm and blues,

'learning how to write, finding all these, everything that I read,

'every film that I saw, any bit of theatre,

'everything went into my mind as being an influence.'

'But at the time, I thought,

' "God, that's going in my memory bank."

'But just about the end of the '60s, it started to come together for me

'that there was a way of expressing, not only musically,

'but visually what one can do.'

# Well

# She takes me up

# She takes me down

# She takes me down, down, down

# Anywhere you want me to be. #

You ready?

Yeah.

MUSIC: "Andy Warhol" by David Bowie

# Like to take a cement fix

# Be a standing cinema

# Dress my friends up just for show

# See them as they really are. #

Warhol, scene one, take one.

# Put a peephole in my brain

# Two new pence to have a go

# I'd like to be a gallery

# Put you all inside my show. #

How come your camera doesn't make any noise?

'This guy was as well-known as the work that he did.'

'In fact, probably more people knew the name and the look of Andy Warhol

'than actually knew what it was he did.'

Oh, it's so glamorous.

Bowie admired Warhol, but also felt competitive with him, in some way.

I think he understood that Warhol's work had waned in the prior years.

Bowie felt on Warhol's level,

wanted to be taken as his peer, and rightly so.

'I did write a song about him, and that rather linked me to him,

'in a certain way.'

# Andy Warhol looks a scream

# Hang him on my wall, oh-oh, oh-oh

# Andy Warhol, silver screen

# Can't tell them apart at all

# Oh-oh, oh-oh, oh. #

'He hated it. He loathed it. He told people afterwards,

' "That's the worst thing I've ever heard."

'I was upset by that, you know.

'I thought it was kind of a flattering portrait of him.

'I thought it was a very contemporary picture

'of Andy at the time.'

If you'd like to take the camera back,

I'd prefer to do something.

You going to do something, still? No.

I do feel that Bowie felt disappointed

in not being embraced by Warhol,

and certainly dramatised his own sense of disease

by doing his hilarious disembowelling mime

at the end of the video that recorded this ill encounter.

'Oh, that's right.

'Did he really?

'Oh, that's nice.'

With Andy Warhol from Hunky Dory, you've got the sense

that Bowie's one of the first people who's able to essay

the experience of stardom, wanting to be a star,

imagining what it's like to be a star.

And even the cover picture has a sense that he knows

that he's starting to turn himself into what, if you're being romantic,

you'd call an icon, and if you're being horribly cynical

and 21st-century, you'd call a brand.

But I'd rather not use that word

because it's a huge disservice to what we're talking about.

# Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

# Turn and face the stranger

# Ch-ch-changes

# Don't want to have to be A richer man

# Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

# Turn and face the stranger

# Ch-ch-changes

# Just wanted to be a better man

# Time may change me

# But I can't trace time. #

I got a call from David, he called me directly,

and he said, "Can you come over to the house?"

And I sat there with him, and he took out this battered old

12-string guitar and said, "I'm going to play you some songs."

And he played me these songs one after the other.

# It's a God-awful small affair

# To the girl with the mousy hair

# But her mummy is yelling "No"

# And her daddy has told her to go

# But her friend is nowhere To be seen

# Now she walks through her sunken dream... #

"Life On Mars?", from Hunky Dory,

was certainly the stand-out song for me,

but it was a challenge in certain areas,

because of some of the chord structure,

because he would lead you down the garden path with quite

a bog-standard chord structure, and then suddenly go AWOL.

Now I've got to try and remember this,

because it is 40 years since I've played it, but...

HE PLAYS "Life On Mars?"

# But her friend is nowhere To be seen

# Now she walks through Her sunken dream

# To the seat with The clearest view... #

Now this is a classic example of where he throws in a chord

that you wouldn't expect.

Normally after...

HE PLAYS SEQUENCE

You would expect it to go back there, but he doesn't. He goes...

HE PLAYS SEQUENCE

But the thing that makes it really clever

is he put an E flat in the bass,

which just gives it a bass part that you can start to move on.

Really clever, so you've got...

HE PLAYS SEQUENCE

# But the film is a saddening bore

# For she's lived it ten times or more. #

Now, after that chord, you would expect it to go to...

HE PLAYS CHORD

But he doesn't.

HE PLAYS SEQUENCE

I mean, nobody... Only David would do something like that.

HE PLAYS SEQUENCE

It's a piano player's joy. In fact, I must go home and learn it.

# Take a look at the lawman

# Beating up the wrong guy

# Oh, man! Wonder if he'll ever know

# He's in the best-selling show

# Is there life on Mars? #

"Life On Mars?" is sort of magic realism, really,

if you listen to it,

that you recognise it as a song about Britain.

And there are references in it which anyone

who grew up in suburbia would understand.

Very mundane, and yet it's magical.

You know, he's seen the cosmos in the bus stop.

# It's on America's tortured brow

# That Mickey Mouse Has grown up a cow

# Now the workers have Struck for fame

# Cos Lennon's on sale again. #

The vocals are performances, they are real, they are live,

and I think that's one of the reasons we're still talking about them today,

because they do resonate with people. Unlike the manufactured

and thrown-together vocals that are so prevalent today, his are real.

# I'm up on the eleventh floor And I'm watching the cruisers below

# Well, I'm down on the street And he's trying hard to... #

Sorry.

Although most of Hunky Dory is not a rock record,

there are stirrings of the Bowie to come.

When you listen to Queen Bitch, it swings.

It has raunch to it, you know.

That record shakes its hips very convincingly.

# Well, it could have been me

# Yes, it could have been me

# Why didn't I say?

# Why didn't I say?

# She's so swishy In her satin and tat

# In her frock coat And bipperty-bopperty hat

# Oh, God, I could do better than that. #

'I think I was getting nearer to what I wanted to do,

'which is to create this alternative world,

'and Hunky Dory was the first,

'really stepping off this planet and going somewhere else.'

So, we'd finished Hunky Dory, and a couple of weeks later

I ran into David walking along the corridor of Trident Studios

and he comes up to me and he says, "We're going to record a new album,"

"But you're not going to like it."

I said, "Why?" and he said, "Well, this is much more rock and roll."

# I'm an alligator

# I'm a mama-papa coming for you. #

Bowie's always been brilliant at finding the right collaborators.

He had the extraordinary Mick Ronson,

who could strike amazing guitar hero poses and fill the hall with riffs

in such a way that Bowie shared the stage with Ronson

in a way that he's never shared a stage with anyone else.

# Freak out in a moon-age daydream, Oh, yeah! #

'When I first heard him play, I thought,

' "That's my Jeff Beck, he is fantastic, this kid is great."

'And so I sort of hoodwinked him into working with me.'

I forget how it goes, but, I mean, that's basically...

He is good at stealing.

You've only got to look at Ziggy, really.

I mean, there is a lot of Lou Reed in there,

a lot of Iggy Pop in there, you know. A lot of all sorts

of influences that he has got in there, you know,

so he would steal little bits.

# Oh, don't lean on me, man

# Cos you can't afford the ticket

# I'm back on Suffragette City

# Oh, don't lean on me, man

# Cos you can't afford to check it

# I'm back on Suffragette City

# Is out of sight. #

'It just seemed like a perfectly natural thing for me at the time,

'to put together all these odds and ends of art and culture

'that I really adored.

'It was just creating something thoroughly artificial,

'but something that worked in the confines of rock and roll.'

# There's only room for one And here she comes

# Here she comes... #

I suppose the whole thing that made Ziggy as popular as it was-stroke-is,

was that it was a good rock album.

Nothing extraordinary, in my opinion,

but a good rock album, and then the image on top of it,

which was really honed to perfection by David,

and people grabbed hold of it.

What Ziggy Stardust does is it projects him as a rock star.

He sings about the imagined experience of being a rock star,

and in doing that, becomes a rock star.

And there is a story about his wife Angie, in the front row,

screaming at him as if he was a rock star,

despite the fact that two men and a dog were there.

What happens, then, really, is that the world fulfils his fantasy.

It aligns itself with what he wants to be.

Which is what I think psychologists call "self-actualisation".

Not many people can do it but he did.

# Suffragette! #

I was sitting next to this guy who was living it,

he was already being it on a daily basis,

and it's funny, but he would eat breakfast as a superstar.

It was like, "This guy means it."

# Ziggy played guitar

# Jamming good with Weird and Gilly

# And the spiders from Mars

# He played it left-hand

# But made it too far... #

'I'd found my character.

'One man against the world. It really reverberated in my mind.

'That's something that I really, kind of, honed in on.'

# ..Screwed up eyes And screwed down hairdo

# Like some cat from Japan

# He could kill 'em by smiling... #

'Ziggy was this kind of mythological priest figure.

'And I only say that in retrospect because I didn't quite know

'what he was then, but it does occur to me now

'that the androgyny of some of the tribal priests throughout history

'have been transvestite in nature.

'I only know this because I read Camille Paglia on the subject.'

Ziggy Stardust is, to me, a kind of colossus that marks

a tremendous transition between the 1960s and the 1970s.

# So we bitched about his fans

# And should we crush his sweet hands? #

The 1970s were a dark era, where sexual promiscuity for its own sake

was pursued in a way that had never been so universal

since the Roman Empire.

Sex without consequence, anonymous sex, pick-ups in dark clubs.

So Ziggy Stardust, when he appeared, was a kind of prefiguration,

almost like the Book of Revelations,

a hallucination of an apocalypse about to occur.

# Making love with his ego

# Ziggy sucked up into his mind

# Like a leper messiah

# When the kids had killed the man

# I had to break up the band. #

What made Ziggy different, and Bowie different, at that point,

was that he turned himself into an idol that people could worship.

Nobody had actually, in pop music, ever done that before.

It was the province of Hollywood.

# There's a starman Waiting in the sky

# He'd like to come and meet us But he thinks he'd blow our minds

# There's a starman Waiting in the sky

# He's told us not to blow it

# Cos he knows it's all worthwhile

# He told me Let the children lose it

# Let the children use it

# Let all the children boogie. #

His management would distribute posters of Bowie at concerts,

so that the fans could pick them up and go home

and put them on the walls, and it was that kind of attention

to detail in thinking about the whole process of stardom

that singled him out from people that had gone before.

I think David was calculating in a lot of things that he did.

He understood how to manipulate his image,

in that he didn't make himself too available.

He just gave them a little bit, and they'd go,

"Oh, we want more of David Bowie."

You know, that sort of thing.

And I used to always wonder about that.

I was like, "Why don't you just give them it all?"

And he was like, "No, I've just got to give them that.

"And then they'll come back for more, and then just give them that."

And it worked.

CROWD CHANT: Bowie! Bowie!

'At that particular time,

'I was chopping and changing really quite drastically.

'The music that I was listening to was definitely the soul music

'that was really, really big in the clubs in America

'at that particular time.

'So I kind of tried to do my own version of that kind of music,

'which was the basis of the Young Americans album.

'I'd become soul man.'

When David really decided he wanted to be a soul man,

he said to me, "So, how shall we do it?

"Where shall we go?"

And, you know, to get the people, the singers, the band and all that.

And I said we should go to New York. To Harlem and go to the Apollo.

So he was like, "OK."

So we went backstage and he met everyone.

I didn't know who David Bowie was,

but I did know this was the whitest man I've ever seen.

I'm not talking about white like pink.

I'm talking about translucent white.

And then he had orange hair.

I'm not talking about your momma's orange,

I'm talking about an orange, orange!

And he was about 98lbs. I'm talking about thin, thin.

I mean, he was freaky.

At one point I told him - and you'll have to excuse my language -

"You look like shit, man. You need some food.

"You need to come to my house."

Come forward. Yeah, that's great.

'Carlos had been able to introduce me

'to a lot of fantastic new musicians,

'one of whom was Luther Vandross, of course.'

So you have this amazing collaboration between Bowie,

and soon-to-be one of the greatest soul singers of all time,

Luther Vandross,

along with all the other background singers who would sing with Luther.

# Taking it all the right way

# Keeping it in the back

# Taking it all the right way

# Never no turning back

# Never need, no Never no turning back

# Taking it all the right way

# Keeping it in the back

# Taking it all the right way

# Never no turning back

# Never need, no Never no turning back. #

Right, from the Young Americans album, was a difficult song

but Luther put it all together for him.

We had...

# Taking it all the right way

# Keeping it all in the back

# Taking it all the right way

# Never no turning back Never need no... #

And then that section comes in.

# Wishing, wishing, sometime Doing it, up there, nobody

# Nobody doing it, getting up. #

That was so hard.

# Time

# Doing it

# Giving it

# Keeping it back. #

Right. That's cool, that's cool.

David had, like, a puzzle.

Just the last line.

He brought this paper to us and said,

"This is how I want you to sing this."

Oh, sorry, I wasn't with you.

It wasn't a straight "just sing it linearly and melodically".

Oh, I see, you count from... Yeah. I thought you were doing an intro.

Right. One, two...

It was "I want it to jump in here, and I want you to jump out there,

"and jump back in here."

# Keeping it back. #

Right, that's fine. OK, so we've got that. That one's all right.

That, too, was the first time I was singing anything like that.

In my life.

But it was brilliant, because he knew exactly what he wanted.

Right, OK, and the last section.

# Gimme, gimme, yeah. #

Oh, Lord, it was too much!

It was like, "Man, I'll be glad when we finish with this song."

-# Wishing that sometimes

-Sometimes

-# Doing it, doing it right, till

-Doing it

-# One time

-One time. #

'There was no point in doing a straightforward take

'on American soul music, because that's been done already,

'so I just wanted to put this spin on it.'

'Eventually, of course, when the album came out,

'it was very well-received,

'and Young Americans became a very big album for me.

'I mean, I really advanced myself.

'I was tumbling over myself with ideas.'

People see you as a very skilful performer,

who changes from time to time from one thing to another.

Yeah. I glit from one thing to another, a lot.

"Glit"?

Mm-hmm. It's like "flit", but it's the '70s version.

One letter later.

To be on Dick Cavett meant you had arrived.

And what's fascinating about that is he's not really playing

by the Dick Cavett rules, if there are any,

in the sense that one watches it and it's like,

"Do you want the whole of America to think you're a complete nutcase?"

"Out of your mind on cocaine?" And he clearly did.

And it was to the benefit of his career.

It rendered him fascinating.

Is the offstage Bowie likely to surprise people?

I've had the weirdest reactions

from people who know that you're going to be on.

Some say they'd be scared to sit and talk to you.

Some people said you'd bite my neck.

A very peculiar kind of thing.

It's what you want, really. What do you think I'm like?

To me you seem like a -

I hope this doesn't insult you - a working actor.

That's right, that's very good.

I mean... What are you drawing?

It's therapeutic.

David, he was a character.

I knew he was, excuse my language, I knew he was fucked up.

But you know, he was good, he was cool, he got through it.

# Pulls her down behind the bridge

# He lays her down, she frowns

# Gee, my life's a funny thing

# Am I still too young?

# He takes her hand and there

# She takes his ring, takes his babies

# Takes him minutes, takes her nowhere

# Heaven knows, she'd have taken anything

# All night

# All night, she wants a young American

# Young American, young American She wants a young American

# All right. #

In terms of the Young American stuff, it was a chance that he grabbed

to be able to do something he had wanted to do since he was 12.

He may have thought, "I won't have a 40-something, 50-year-old career,"

and he may have thought, "I'm going to get this in while I can."

Carlos had a riff that he'd had in his head for some time

which I put to a standard called Footstompin' by The Flares.

# Everybody, young and old

# Learns how to rock and roll

# Listen to something new

# Everybody sure can do it

# Footstompin', footstompin'. #

David always liked that little line as I was playing it with...

PLAYS "FAME" RIFF

He liked that but he hated the song later on.

So I'm called back into the studio.

After we finished Young Americans

he called me down to Electric Lady Studio

and I get there and he had cut the song up into a more blues format,

what we called the one-four-five-four format.

And he had cut it up but the only thing he had kept was...

PLAYS "FAME" RIFF

I heard that and I was like,

"OK, we're going to do something with that,"

and I started laying down ideas and laying down ideas.

I'm going to play the first thing that we did and how we layered it

so you can hear what happens.

PLAYS "FAME" RIFF

First part, add a little bass.

Doesn't that sound like Fame?

David comes in, he goes, "Oh, I hear this line."

What happened is that John Lennon came to the session.

We sort of said, "Let's take that riff and write something over it."

It was Carlos' riff.

Fame.

John was playing and he kept on coming up with, "Ame! Ame!"

and I put an F in front of it and that was it, really.

# Fame makes a man take things over

# Fame lets him loose, hard to swallow

# Fame puts you there Where things are hollow

# Fame

# Fame, not your brain, it's just the flame

# That burns your change to keep you insane, sane. #

David wasn't trying to be a soul singer.

But as far as being taken seriously, he wanted to be taken seriously

but he wasn't trying to be a pretender.

MUSIC: "A Natural Woman" by Aretha Franklin

# Looking out on the morning rain

# I used to feel so uninspired. #

It was surreal because

it was getting close to the point where we were casting the movie.

I knew there was something I had to get that was totally different.

And suddenly this programme came on and by chance I saw it.

There's a fly floating around in my milk.

He's a foreign body in it, you see, and he's getting a lot of milk.

That's kind of how I feel.

# You make me feel like a natural woman. #

He wasn't being over-careful or worried about losing an image.

Maybe that was the image.

And almost from that moment,

I couldn't believe it because I thought, "This is the man."

VOICEOVER: Nothing you have seen or heard about David Bowie

will prepare you for the impact of his first dramatic performance

in The Man Who Fell To Earth.

This is another dimension of David Bowie.

One of the few true originals of our time.

David calculated all of this.

I think he said, "Yeah, I'm Ziggy. No, I'm not Ziggy. I'm soul man.

"Now I was a soul man, now maybe an actor."

Yes, I think that he calculated all of that.

VOICEOVER: The Man Who Fell To Earth is a powerful love story.

A cosmic mystery. A spectacular fantasy.

A shocking, mind-stretching experience.

The film was the first thing I'd been given

where I didn't have to play a rock 'n' roll star for a start.

I wasn't required to sing.

I wanted it to be considered as a serious sort of attempt at acting.

The early scenes where we're together in the hotel room,

his skin just reflects the light so beautifully.

He does look like he's from another planet.

Oh, I'm just visiting.

Oh, a traveller?

'As to how close it was to him, pretty close.

'You know there wasn't a lot of changes to him.'

That was the colour of his hair. They didn't change his hair.

He just said, "Be yourself!"

HE LAUGHS

I think Nick realised I had some serious problems at the time

and just thought, "He's perfect.

"Just put him in, just change his clothes,

"just put him in as he is and let him just walk through it," and I did.

All I could do as far as his performances were concerned

was stop myself from trying to influence him.

And some days my face ached through not being able to use it.

Everything had to be absolutely expressionless.

Three months of being totally "the iceman cometh".

You don't know? How could you? You're simple.

He might think he's being expressionless, but he really isn't.

His body language, everything is telling me something

when I'm working opposite him.

You won't find anyone else like me, you know.

'The way he blinks his eyes, the way he looks away,

'the way he moves his hand tells me something.'

So he's wrong when he's saying he's expressionless.

He's really not.

The actual alien was more that vulnerable part

when he wasn't Mr Newton.

When Candy Clarke found him taking the stuff out of his eye,

and she's freaked out and he was so freaked out that she saw him

because he was trying to hide it so well.

And it just seemed like something about him in real life to me.

SHE SCREAMS

It had a certain truth in,

he made the mistake of telling her his secret.

Of course, in that final sequence, it can't be the same,

it'll never be the same again, you know,

which was terribly sad.

You've just finished making the film called The Man Who Came To Earth.

-Fell To Earth.

-Fell To Earth, I beg your pardon.

It's not an easy film to explain to people who haven't seen it.

It's very, very sad. Very romantic.

It brought a lump to my throat watching it.

And it's been a gas working on it.

David, we're coming towards the end of our all-too-brief conversation.

Oh, that's a shame.

I think what we might do is end with a bit of music.

I gather that, at your end, you have some music with you.

The song is called The Shape Of Things To Come.

-No, it isn't.

-No, of course it isn't.

-We're having a preview of The Shape Of Things to Come.

-Ah.

-The song is called Golden Tears.

-Years.

Mr David Bowie, we'll come back to you after we've seen some.

You did get it wrong. It's Years. Years.

Years. Why don't you introduce it from that end?

This is David Bowie singing Golden Years,

from his forthcoming album Station To Station.

# Golden years

# Gold, whop, whop, whop

# Golden years

# Gold, whop, whop, whop

# Don't let me hear you say life's taking you nowhere

# Angel

# Come, get up my baby

# Look at that sky, life's begun

# Nights are warm and the days are young

# Come, get up my baby

# There's my baby lost that's all

# Once I'm begging you save her little soul

# Golden years, gold, whop, whop, whop. #

It was kind of a very weird time

and it was LA and it was the '70s and it was coke

and it was weird people hanging around and people who didn't speak

and just whistled and stuff like that.

"You know, man, heavy."

It was like being on another planet, yeah.

# Run for the shadows, run for the shadows in these golden years. #

I was probably fairly psychically damaged.

Not probably. I WAS psychically damaged.

I guess trying to get what I was understanding

expressed in musical form.

Everybody was on drugs.

At that period of time, we were all well out there.

But not so out there that we didn't make a great record

so, I mean, you know.

Or maybe our view of being out there

and being people's views of being out there

doesn't necessarily correlate with the fact

that we were incapable of making a record.

Whatever "out there" was, "out there" worked.

I think the biggest influence on that album was

the work of Kraftwerk, and the new German sound.

I tried to apply some of the randomness

and I utilised a lot of that feeling for especially the title track,

Station To Station.

The feedback intro at the beginning of Station To Station

was an idea that David had.

So we had a few Marshall stacks on the back wall

and we just did the feedback together something like...

GUITAR PRODUCES FEEDBACK

Earl Slick was asked to do something unnatural and that was,

"I want you to sustain a note for, like, 15 years!"

Boom!

You are waiting for your part but you can't. You've got to hold it.

Don't play, don't play, just hold it.

Finally you get to play one little thing.

Station To Station, I really can't put a title on what it is he does.

I mean, I can put a title on Young Americans

but everything after that I don't have a title for it.

It was supposed to be deadly, and just brutal.

Just this hard, hard, heavy, dark, dark texture

that just laid down.

Just bog it down, bog it down.

# The return of the Thin White Duke

# Throwing darts in lovers' eyes

# Here am I

# One magical movement

# Such is the stuff from where dreams are woven. #

Station To Station dealt with a character called

the Thin White Duke, who was a European living in America,

who wanted to get back to Europe again.

# Bending sound

# Dredging the ocean lost in my circle. #

Know what I think?

I think a lot of really nasty shit happened, business wise,

and with hangers on and all these useless fucks that you accumulate.

# It's not the side effects of the cocaine

# I'm thinking that it must be love

# It's too late to be grateful

# It's too late to be late again

# It's too late to be hateful

# The European cannon is here. #

I started really getting very, very worried for my life.

I just had to get myself out of that situation.

It wasn't surprising at all that he wanted away from LA.

He hated LA towards the end.

LA at that point was a very, very alien society.

It was kind of unreal with unreal people.

I just did too much and I came close several times to overdosing.

It was like being in a car where the steering had gone out of control

and you were going towards the edge of a cliff.

I'd almost resigned myself to the fact that I'm going over the edge.

You know, I'm not going to be able to stop.

I was tiring of the method I was writing.

I wanted to develop a new language

so I knew that my next move was to have to do that.

I discarded for the time being characters and environments.

I couldn't look at myself properly at the time.

I needed some help and who better to work with, I thought, than Eno.

And, of course, I found what I consider a soul mate there.

He's a constantly changing person.

I knew he was sort of getting tired with the way he'd been working.

I knew also he liked a particular album that I had made very much.

It was Discrete Music, which is my longest, slowest, quietest album.

The fact that he liked that sort of alerted me to the idea that

he was wanting to go somewhere else in his own music.

We would get in the studio, it was really wide open.

That's why I like doing recordings with him

because it was, like, real easy, you know.

Until Brian Eno came along.

That Brian Eno, he was a character!

The problem actually I had at that time was that

I didn't really understand how good musicians worked.

I'm not a musician myself in that sense.

Brian Eno had a blackboard, you know,

like elementary school, you know.

I'm like, "You've got a blackboard. So?"

So we started coming up with these ideas for different chords.

E, C, G, B, and so he'd go,

"I'm going to point to that chord and you play that chord

"and then I'll point to another."

So I'm playing and it goes D.

When you're working with really great players,

like Carlos and Dennis, you have to accept that they have a way of

processing information that is beyond intellectual.

"Dude, man. Hey, Brian, look. What are you... This is...

"This isn't working for me, man."

But with their incredibly natural musicianship,

the two together produce something that, again,

one wouldn't have had with either on their own.

I mean, some of it worked, some of it didn't,

but quite honestly it did take me out of my comfort zone

and it did make me leave my frustration at what I was doing

and totally look at it from another different point of view

and, although I didn't like the point of view,

when I came back, I was fresh.

I think Eno opened up new doors of perception.

In terms of the use of the studio,

I'd never used a studio in quite the way that Brian was using it.

I received a phone call from David and Brian Eno

and they said, "What can you bring to the table?"

I said, "I've got this new thing called a harmoniser."

And they said, "What does this thing do?"

And I thought, and I said,

"It fucks with the fabric of time. This is science fiction."

And I could hear the two of them whooping on the other end.

They just went, like, "Whoa! Woo!"

Something like that, you know.

It was very exciting

because it enabled you to change the pitch of things.

So what we did with Dennis' snare drum was

we fed it through the harmoniser,

dropped its pitch and then fed that back through again.

so it goes... but faster.

Even though, musically,

it has absolutely nothing to do with the blues,

Low is, in a weird way, Bowie's blues album.

His marriage was breaking up.

He was having serious business hassles with ex-managers.

And, like a blues man, he was attempting to deal with those

troubles by, as part of the process, singing about them.

It was evident that he was having problems

and he wanted to come into the studio to get away from everything

but you kind of bring everything with you and so Breaking Glass

had that kind of feeling so we started it,

and he really wanted, like, angry, very, very punky.

David came up with...

# Baby

# I've been

# Breaking glass in your... #

And I was trying to figure out,

he probably did that shit yesterday in somebody's room.

You know, cos David writes this stuff about life shit.

And it had that kind of...

# I've been breaking glass in my room again. #

Then Dennis and George kicked in with theirs so it was just...

# Baby

# I've been

# Breaking glass in your room again

# Listen. #

It just needed a positive decision to only do what I want to do

and not do things for the sake of what,

either David Bowie or whoever I was playing last time,

Thin White Duke or something, was expected to do.

# I drew something awful on it. #

What I think excites both of us

is the idea of going where nobody's been before

and trying to find out what you could do there, you know.

David, I think, was really interested

in new moods and landscapes and textures

that you could get with electronics

and he didn't feel a compulsion to turn everything into a song.

I cannot think of anybody comparable

in terms of being sort of that famous.

Dylan, The Stones, The Beatles.

Elvis. People of that stature.

Can you imagine even any of those people

making a record which was half instrumental

at the supposed peak of their career?

It was never going to happen.

# Milejo

# Sula vie

# Milejo, ejo. #

On Warszawa he was using sort of non-language

so they still weren't songs in the conventional sense.

Is there a danger that, by following your instinct,

that you will jeopardise the money and the good life?

No shit, Sherlock!

Yes, I think I've rather hit that one on the head at the moment.

And it's quite a relief, really.

I feel a lot more...free.

Some critics who wrote about it,

god, they really need...they really need to get a proper job sometimes.

They kind of moan about it. "Oh, what are you doing?"

'I don't give a shit about how clever it may or may not be.

'It stinks of artfully counterfeited spiritual defeat and futility

'and emptiness. We're low enough already, David.

'Give us a high or else just swap tapes with Eno by post

'and leave those of us who'd rather search for solutions than lie

'down and be counted to try and find ourselves instead of lose ourselves.

'You're a wonderful person but you've got problems.'

Yeah, that's what I wrote.

The music to me sounds really a little a bit alienated

-so I'm very surprised...

-Alienated from what?

From...from...from... OK, from my world.

From your world? Uh-huh, OK.

Can you understand it?

Yes, I can because it's new language.

I went naked in Berlin.

I really did try and strip down my life

to what I believed to be absolute basic essentials

so I could build up again.

I virtually gave a lot of possessions away,

and my wardrobe really was just jeans and checked shirts

and that's how I walked about and I had a bicycle and that was it.

I think it was the first freedom I'd had from all those

so-called trappings of celebrity.

He was kind of recuperating.

He soaked up all this very fascinating European music

and carried on making albums.

It's better than sitting in the Priory for two years.

David and I were talking. We had a number of pieces in progress

and David said, "What shall we do next? How should we work on them?"

I said, "Well, why don't we call Fripp and see what he would offer?"

The voice came on and said,

"It's Brian, hello! I'm here with David. We're in Berlin.

"Hang on, I'll pass you over," so Eno passed the phone over to David

and David said, "Hello, we're here in...

"Do you think you can play some hairy rock'n'roll guitar?"

What is hairy rock'n'roll?

It has danger.

What is the difference between pop

and rock'n'roll?

You might get fucked.

Can you put that in

or should I express it in alternative terminology?

It was a collaboration, a highly successful collaboration,

the new one, and with the addition of Fripp as middle man,

I think that helped an awful lot as well.

And Eno said, "Well, why don't you plug in?" So I plugged in.

They hit the play button.

And then on bar three you'll hear...

with skysaw guitars,

and that's straight into Beauty And The Beast

and what you hear on the record, the first track of Heroes,

is the first note I played on the session, first take,

going all the way through.

# Down the highway, sing the song

# That's my kind of highway gone wrong

# My my

# Smile at least

# You can't say never to the beauty and the beast. #

Anyone who's playing Beauty And The Beast,

you know they get erections.

# There's something in the night, something in the day

# Nothing is wrong but darling someone's in the way

# There's slaughter in the air, protest on the wind

# Someone deep inside of me

# Someone could get skinned, how? #

Most of Heroes takes you back to that very poetic, somewhat obtuse,

often gloriously indecipherable way of doing things

which you'd heard in Station To Station.

It's great but I don't really know what he's talking about

and so the sort of mystery kind of returns.

But, at the same time, the title song of Heroes is an exception to

that idea that he's sort of become very obtuse again.

MUSIC: "Heroes" by David Bowie

I always knew that was going to be a great song

from the very first moment those guys started playing it.

You thought, "OK, yes, this is a good one."

And then I think the really crucial moment in it came

actually with Fripp.

# I

# I wish you could swim. #

Fripp's plaintive guitar cry really triggered off something

emotive in me, and it was a song of triumph, and it was like,

"I've been a real idiot some of my life

"and put myself in ridiculously dangerous situations

"and I seem to have been getting through it."

And that became part and parcel of that song.

You can overcome some incredible odds.

# We can beat them

# Forever and ever

# Oh, we can be heroes

# Just for one day. #

Fripp did three takes on it and we used all three.

This is Tony Visconti's genius that he can do that

without it sounding a mess.

David sat down in the control room

and he said, "Could you just take a walk?"

He goes, "I'm writing and I just want to be to myself

"and I want to finish these lyrics."

So I was having a little flirtation, shall we say,

with the singer Antonia Maass.

She was the female vocalist on the album.

We walked outside the studio where, from the control room,

you could see the Berlin Wall and you could see a lot of rubble

and you could see the guards and the gun turrets.

And right beneath the window we had a little snog.

And David saw that and he said, "That's the second verse!"

# And we kissed

# As though nothing could fall. #

The thing that was most exciting about it all is that

I found that without drugs I was still writing very well,

you know, and that was probably the most rejuvenating aspect of it all,

is that you don't need to get stoned out of your gourd to write well,

you know? I think that was,

you know, an incredibly important period for me.

Not very fast, are you?

I can't say it was like night and day that suddenly

was this different person.

It wasn't. It took quite a long time.

But I think, you know, I did see light at the end of the tunnel,

and it wasn't a train.

When I met Bowie again around the time of Heroes

I was struck by the fact that his hair was its natural colour,

he wasn't wearing any make up,

he was wearing a shirt so un-rockstar-y

it virtually qualified as suburban casual wear.

It was almost like saying, "OK, this is the real me."

Though, of course, one did suspect

is this affable natural Dave

simply the latest mask?

And is there something still lurking beneath

this apparently lifelike surface?

-Can I ask you one last thing?

-Mm.

People I've talked to who worked with you say

you're a very personal person, if you know what I mean?

-People who go out with me?

-No, to WORK with you!

I thought you said people who go out with me!

You're a very, erm... Not secretive, but personal.

-Keep things to yourself.

-Quite...quite quiet, yes.

Do you think you're shy?

No.

No, I'm not really shy. I'm just a bit quiet.

Do you think if you didn't keep things to yourself

people wouldn't be surprised at what you did next?

I've never really thought about that.

-I'll let you know after the show.

-OK, thanks.

Off to do a show. Come with me?

AUDIENCE CHEERS

MUSIC: "Heroes" by David Bowie

# I

# I will be king

# And you

# You will be my queen

# Though nothing

# Can keep us together

# We can beat them

# Forever and ever. #

I guess you merit being seen as the ultimate artist of your era

if you do two things.

First of all, if you change what you do at a mind-boggling rate.

If you're not only prodigious, but the diversity of the work you

come up with is incredible, and Bowie does that in the '70s.

And then the other thing is

whether you act as a lightning rod for your time.

# And the shame

# Fell on the other side

# Oh, we can beat them

# Forever and ever

# We could be heroes

# Just for one day. #

David, looking back over the '70s, into the '80s,

how do you look at music in the '70s?

Sort of like this.

# Ground Control to Major Tom

# Ground Control to Major Tom

# Take your protein pills and put your helmet on

# Ground Control to Major Tom

# Commencing countdown, engines on

# Check ignition and may God's love be with you. #

The Kenny Everett Video Show was sort of cheerleader in England

for what we might call the video generation,

what we might call the music video generation, which, at that time,

was so totally new to the Brits and indeed unheard of to the Americans,

that I think he immediately clocked it.

And the Space Oddity video

was really something that we cobbled together quite quickly.

# You've really made the grade

# And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear. #

I think Major Tom is the first time I'd been able to create

a character that was very credible.

I think, for any writer, that's a high point.

He preceded all the others

and I suppose one has a special place for him.

# ..to Ground Control

# I'm stepping through the door. #

It is very interesting that, at the end of the '70s,

he goes back to his first key character.

Major Tom returns, in the sense of

an updated performance of Space Oddity.

But then he takes the character of Major Tom,

puts it in a new song and does very interesting things with it.

So Major Tom becomes a much more discomforting, sinister figure.

# Do you remember a guy that's been

# In such an early song

# I heard a rumour from Ground Control

# Oh, no, don't say it's true

# Got a message from the action man

# I'm happy, hope you're happy too. #

Major Tom became a little, sort of, bouncy hero.

I just wanted to sort of bring him up-to-date a little bit

and put him in a Victorian nursery rhyme kind of atmosphere.

Even though it's not Victorian, it has that queasiness of those,

# Ring a ring of roses

# This is about the plague and we're all going to drop down dead #

kind of thing about it, which is what I did with the piece.

# I'm happy, hope you're happy too

# I've loved and I've needed love

# Sordid details following. #

David rang me. "Could we make a video for this new single?"

We sat round a table and he said, "I want to be a clown on the beach."

I said, "Whoopee, I've just done something on a beach and by accident

"I found this great effect of making the sky black

"and everybody have a halo."

Then he wanted a digger.

# But I'm hoping to kick but the planet is glowing

# Ashes to ashes, funk to funky

# We know Major Tom's a junkie. #

David allows me lots and lots of freedom to do very much what I want,

the ways I want it edited. I storyboard it for him,

show him exactly what frames I want done.

And then he puts his input in as well.

And, especially on Ashes to Ashes,

the combination has been very successful.

The people round the bonfire on the beach in Ashes to Ashes

were people from Blitz, which is a London club,

which was the precursor of the Modern Romantic movement.

David managed to clock the whole Modern Romantic movement

way before anybody else.

It showed him co-opting a new phase of youth culture,

which he'd been the key figure in inspiring in the first place.

So some might say he was imitating his imitators.

Others were saying he was buying them off and getting them onboard.

It's certainly one of the better songs I've ever written

in terms of familiarity and a song that really hooks in.

I felt very positive about the future and I got down

to writing a really comprehensive and well-crafted album.

David came into the studio with a lot of ideas

and I remember he had his demos on a new contraption called a Walkman.

Carlos Alomar flipped when he saw it and heard it.

Fashion for the Scary Monsters album,

David had this need to maybe even reproduce a bit of the Fame feeling

so we wanted to keep everything up so it would give him

a secure commercially viable album that he could work with.

So Fashion started just with this very funky beat.

PLAYS RIFF

Then it grew it into a monster.

People started over-dubbing stuff on it.

Fripp started over dubbing this crazy guitar to it.

It was just evolving into a fantastic track.

I don't believe you'll find another guitarist who would have

played that to that.

It's very out.

From a point of view of making a contribution to the work

of an artist with their producer, the opportunity to do that

and be supported and encouraged in it...

..it's out, it's out.

# There's a brand-new dance but I don't know its name

# That people from bad homes do again and again. #

It was kind of a little wary of the Lemming-like quality

that people were slaves to fashion.

# It's big and it's bland, full of tension and fear. #

It was dictatorial authority that the thing seems to grasp people.

It was a lightweight, throw-away song, as important as fashion.

# Fashion, turn to the left

# Fashion, turn to the right

# Oooh, fashion!

# We are the goon squad and we're coming to town, beep-beep. #

'We are the goon squad and we're coming to town, beep-beep.'

Now, ain't that a line which sticks in the mind?

# Listen to me, don't listen to me

# Talk to me, don't talk to me

# Dance with me, don't dance with me

# No, beep-beep. #

And now Bowie in New York.

The play in which rock star David Bowie has scored a remarkable triumph

on Broadway is called The Elephant Man.

Bowie's first appearance as a straight actor met with

almost universal praise from the New York critics

and there are long lines at the box office.

The baths have rid you of your odour, have they not?

First chance I've had to bathe regular...ly.

'I went to see it on Broadway and I was totally knocked out by it.'

And then Jack Hofsiss, the director, came to see me

a couple of months later whilst I was back in New York yet again

doing the Scary Monsters album, and asked me if I would consider

taking over the role at the end of the year.

And I was flabbergasted cos I had never been asked to do anything

that sort of supposedly legit.

This is your promised land, is it not?

A roof, food, care, protection?

Right, Mr Treves.

'I noticed that, as David created the voice for the character,

'there was a quality there that was very unique.'

I thought that was the core of the uniqueness of his performance.

You call it home.

Never had a home before.

Well, you have one now.

Say it, John, home!

-Home?

-No, no, I mean REALLY say it. "I have a home.

"This is my..." Come on.

I have a home.

This is...

my home.

'There was no make-up at all.'

This... is my home?

And that demanded that the audience,

in conjunction with the actor,

imagined what this guy really looked like

and the way he moved.

I think the toughest part was just working with my own body

and trying to create this really distorted ugly figure

without using make up.

It came very naturally to me.

I presume that it was something to do with the mime training

that I had earlier.

I have to say that you can tell

when there's a real actor coming back at you when you rehearse.

And in his case it was a real actor there

and that's the highest praise I can give him.

I am reading Romeo and Juliet.

Ah, Juliet! What a love story.

I adore love stories.

I like love stories best, too.

If I had been Romeo, guess what?

What?

I would not have held the mirror to her breath.

What?

'I hope that he really knew how good he was in the part.'

And it was a wonderful performance

that remained wonderful throughout his entire run.

If I had been Romeo,

we would have got away.

I think I wanted to re-evaluate what I wanted to do, musically.

I did a hell of a lot in a short period and I needed to get

some space away from writing music because it was becoming,

possibly, too much of an exercise and the enthusiasm had gone.

But now it seems to be back again.

'EMI are celebrating.

'Against serious opposition and for very serious money,

'they've just signed a real superstar.'

Ladies and gentleman, Mr David Bowie.

APPLAUSE

'EMI don't give lavish receptions like this very often.

'They won't say how much they paid for Bowie but rumours

'range from £10 million to £17 million for a five-year contract.'

Reportedly so, yes. I'm overwhelmed that I've...

Is that anywhere near accurate?

It's absolutely nowhere near accurate.

-Can you give us a more accurate figure?

-Of course not.

Thank you very much and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

Bowie's attitude to himself and his music seems to have changed

and with that comes a change of producer,

so out goes Tony Visconti,

who one associates with the art for art's sake period.

And in comes Nile Rodgers.

He's just had that huge run of hits with Chic and Sister Sledge.

He's gone on to produce Diana Ross.

But it just doesn't seem like what one would have expected from

the David Bowie of the '70s and the first part of the '80s.

Seems somewhat uncharacteristic.

When we met originally, it was completely by chance,

and he was sitting alone, back of this nightclub,

and I spotted him right away.

I walked in with Billy Idol and Billy walked in and went,

"Bloody hell, that's David Bowie!"

And when he said "Bowie,"

cos he called him BOW-ie, we called him BOH-ie,

he vomited, he barfed.

It was, like, hysterical. By that time, I was already chatting him up.

Later, David said to me that he wanted me to do what I did best.

So when I asked David what he thought I did best,

he looked at me and says, "You make hits."

I was charged with the responsibility of doing such.

So, one morning in Switzerland,

he walks into my bedroom.

He says something to the effect of,

"Nile, darling, I think I have a song that feels like it's a hit".

He comes in with this 12-string guitar

that only has six strings on it.

When you see a 12-string guitar, you're in folk city right away.

Something like that.

So when I started fooling around with it,

I made it very jazzy, very cool,

but Bowie is a jazzy cool guy, unbeknownst to most people,

but I certainly knew that.

So...

It was cool.

It was ultra-cool.

It was pretty normal cool.

But you put in the delays and all of a sudden you get groove and funk

and rhythm all at the same time.

# Let's dance. #

It has an intention of being danceable but I think,

in terms of lyric, I've tried to keep it simple as anything

that I've ever written before.

I'm trying to write in a more obvious and positive manner

than I've written in a long time.

# Let's dance

# Put on your red shoes and dance the blues

# Let's dance

# To the song they're playing on the radio

# Let's sway. #

Let's Dance is an interesting song.

because it's basically a funk groove, an old funk...

# Sway through the crowd to an empty space. #

And Nile just knew how to put that into place

and then put the hook line behind it

and in the shortest amount of time, you had the song.

Let's Dance is not a traditional, what I would call, dance record,

but it's certainly a record that does make you want to dance.

I just thought to myself,

"Man, if I don't make a record that makes people want to dance,

"and we call the song Let's Dance, I'm going to have to trade in

"my black union card, cos that just doesn't make sense."

# Tremble like a flower. #

This is something that can be played in every mall in America.

It's a mainstream record by an artist who already has a pedigree.

Mick Jagger tried to do his own Let's Dance a couple of times.

Never worked.

McCartney dabbled.

A lot of those guys dabbled cos that was what was going on.

None of them made a record as good as what Bowie made.

# Under the moonlight

# The serious moonlight. #

I've tried to produce something that's warmer

and more humanistic than anything that I've done for a long time.

Less emphasis on the nihilistic kind of statement

and the icy...one-dimensional kind of thing

that I've been working with over the last few years.

So we had cut Let's Dance and at the end of the day he gives me

a copy of China Girl and says that he thinks it's a hit.

So I wanted it to have a hook.

I thought, "Man, maybe I'll key off the word China."

PLAYS 'CHINA GIRL' RIFF

And I said to myself,

either David is going to hate this so much that he'll fire me

or he'll get the comedic value of writing a silly little poppy thing.

But I have to admit, I was nervous as hell

and I played it for him

and David went, "I love it."

# Uh, oh, oh, oh, oh

# Little China girl

# Uh, oh, oh, oh, oh

# Little China girl

# I could escape this feeling

# With my China girl

# I feel a wreck without my little China girl

# I hear her heart beating

# Loud as thunder

# Saw the stars crashing. #

This is the '80s. It's MTV explosion time.

He had been a video experimenter

but this record put him right there in the middle of MTV-isation

and gave his career a whole other life.

# You know, I'll give you television

# I'll give you eyes of blue

# I'll give you men who want to rule the world

# And when I get excited

# My little China girl. #

David went from being, let's say, a high profile cult star,

to mainstream.

The look was more mainstream, even though he had bleachy blond hair

and all the suits and everything.

It was a lot different than

that Thin White Duke ominous character, or Ziggy.

It was the most mainstream I'd ever seen him.

Out of the clear blue sky, he was taking boxing lessons

and, like, he was beefy, he was cleaner.

Don't take any notice of them. They're all perfectly harmless.

'He was happier and jovial.'

On your new album, you're determined to be yourself.

How do we know this isn't another one of your masks?

I don't know. It's a bit like the boy who cried wolf.

He was, "Hey!"

you, know. I found it a little odd,

in that it was a very happy David.

Do you see the music going back to basics from here on?

Tonight, I think it might be very basic.

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentleman,

the 1983 Serious Moonlight Tour!

David Bowie!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

MUSIC: "Let's Dance" by David Bowie

# Let's dance

# Put on your red shoes and dance the blues

# Let's dance

# To the song they're playing on the radio. #

I think we're out of characters now and just into suits

and the suit will change from tour to tour,

but the bloke inside it is generally much the same.

# Sway through the crowd to an empty space. #

Let's Dance hit so strongly that everything changed.

We thought we were going to do a couple of indoor theatres,

indoor arenas through Europe.

It just quickly turned around, which was a surprise.

And you're just riding this big old train going,

"All right, everybody, hang on, here we go."

# Fame makes a man take things over

# Fame keeps him loose and hard to swallow

# Fame puts him there, things are hollow

# Fame. #

It was beyond belief to me. Suddenly I wasn't a cult artist any more.