Bowie: A Biography (52 page)

“I was so into the music I wanted to copy him,” Strange says today. “I copied his hairstyle, which got me banned from school. I was a straight-A student until around this time.” After school in 1976, Strange took up an offer from then–Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock to come down to London and stay at his apartment. He decided this was his way out. “After school you were either going to be very athletic and take up rugby and become a rugby player or you’d have to do what your father and your grandfather did before and go down the mines,” Strange recalls. In London he fell in with the Pistols-following “Bromley Contingent,” which included Siouxsie Sioux, Generation X’s Tony James and Billy Idol, and future Pistols bassist and junkie death icon Sid Vicious, among others. Strange worked for Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, selling and modeling clothes at Seditionaries, the shop he’d opened with Vivienne West-wood. He also made paste-up posters for Pistols gigs and roadied on the Anarchy tour. A record collector, by punk’s flame-out, he’d amassed an impressive collection of hard-to-find “new” music, browsing in local bins along each tour stop. A local scenester named Rusty Egan, also bored with punk, had been doing the same, and one night while sitting around the stereo in a friend’s flat, they determined that the “new” music sounded excellent when mixed in with the glitter “oldies.” “We’d play Nina Hagen, Bauhaus, early Eno, Kraftwerk. We thought, ‘What if we had a club and between this new futuristic music we would mix in favorite Bowie tracks and glam-period?’” Strange had been ensconced in the punk scene long enough to know that just about every punk, from the Clash’s Mick Jones (a great Mott the Hoople fan) to the cantankerous Lydon (a massive Alice Cooper fan) could not resist a good glitter-age number.

They booked a “Bowie Night” at a local bar on Dean Street in Soho. The venue used to be a social club known as the Gargoyle, where Noel Coward sipped cocktails with Tallulah Bankhead, but it had gone seedy.
This was Billy’s bar. “The working girls would come into the club and they mixed in with all these freaks,” Strange says. “They’d come in just for a shot to keep warm on a cold night.” They’d pass out flyers and soon the club became so popular that Strange would have to work the door, where he got a reputation for imperiousness. He’d often hold a mirror up to a particularly tacky or obnoxious would-be partier and ask, “Would you let you in?”

“I’d become known as a real bastard on the door,” he says. Strange’s rope policy was Wildean in its embrace of well-contemplated hedonism and invention, not just crass bids for attention or acceptance. “Basically the philosophy on the flyer was ‘Let your creativity flow.’ Don’t disappear into a pastiche wallpaper. But I was not talking about being ludicrous. One guy turned up in a bloody wetsuit. I said, ‘No no no.’ Most probably he thought this was real creativity and I thought, ‘What a fucking arsehole.’ We moved from Billy’s after about three months and decided it must be time to move to a bigger venue.”

The Blitz Club was a wine bar decorated with images of the Nazi Blitzkrieg, and each Tuesday, it would be filled to capacity with Bowie nuts, with another hundred of them patiently waiting in line outside, determined to breach Steve Strange’s phalanx of ’tude, to which even rock ’n’ roll legends were not immune. Often they’d have live bands, and future legends like Depeche Mode played some of their earliest gigs there. Visiting performers like Divine, Nona Hendryx of Labelle and David Byrne made it past Strange and his mirror. When a drunken Mick Jagger and his entourage were turned away, however, it made the red-top tabloids the following day, and by the subsequent Tuesday, the Blitz was even more impenetrable. One celebrity guest, however, could still reduce the impossibly fierce and fire-code-wary Strange to the likes of a cloying Olive Garden hostess. A few weeks after the Jagger debacle, which was picked up by the tabloids, Bowie turned up unannounced and requested entry.

“This black limousine circled for about an hour, a limo with blacked-out windows,” Strange says. “I’d seen it in an hour go around at least three times, and in this hour the queue had gotten bigger and bigger, then a lady came up and said, ‘I need a private word.’” This was, of course, Coco Schwab. “She was a bit abrupt and a bit rude. She said to me, ‘I have David Bowie in the back of the limo and we’d like it if he
could be entertained. David really liked what he’s read about you and the club.’ I was like, fucking hell, David Bowie has finally come!”

Bowie was there on a mission. As Strange visited him in a makeshift private section to the side of the dance floor, Bowie, as he had at the Mudd Club with Klaus Nomi, made his proposal. “He said, ‘This club is what London’s been missing for a long time. I just love what you’re doing. I would like you to pick and style four people for the music video to my new song “Ashes to Ashes.”’ I couldn’t believe it.” It was well after midnight and Strange was instructed to be at the Hilton Hotel by six
AM
with his extras and costumes ready to go. “Since it was the Hilton, I figured we’d be flown to some exotic location to do this video. Little did we know he sort of shut off Southend beach.”

“The beach was my idea,” the “Ashes to Ashes” clip’s codirector David Mallet says today of the famous location for what remains one of music video’s most genuinely odd and innovative high points. “It was in Hastings in Sussex, a location I’d known since I was a little boy. One of the very rare places you can get right down to the water and there’s a cliff towering over you.”

While on location on that blustery morning, Bowie spied an abandoned bulldozer on the beach and its owners were located and the machinery quickly employed. The bulldozer follows Bowie, in Pierrot clown costume, as he leads Strange and his mates, dressed in black ecclesiastical robes, along the shoreline. “My robe kept catching in the bulldozer,” Strange recalls. “That’s why I kept doing that move where I pull my arm down. So I wouldn’t be crushed. Bowie liked the move and used it later in his video for ‘Fashion’!”

The song, the first single off
Scary Monsters
, was a bit of a Bowie revival itself. While musically it’s synth driven and New Wave–ish, lyrically it reintroduces Major Tom, the hero of “Space Oddity.” “Do you remember a guy that’s been / In such an early song?” Bowie sings, in a clear, earnest falsetto. He could easily be singing to Steve Strange’s generation.

They, of course, not only remembered but still lived for Major Tom.
The Face
magazine, founded by Nick Logan in the spring of 1980, fast became the monthly of record as far as fashion, art and style went for London’s youth culture. For the editorial staff and readers, many of them grown-up Ziggy kids as well, Bowie was not only untouchable but a template
for all the profile subjects and models included in this new culture bible, from Duran Duran to Boy George to Echo and the Bunnymen. Even its stylists and photographers were all Bowie-mad early on. “There would not be a
Face
without Bowie,” says Jon Savage. “And
The Face
was essential. Avant-garde. I mean, I don’t know what the phrase is now … What is the phrase now when marketers want to get the kind of future thinkers and the elite group? It was those kind of people. Trendsetters would buy it.”

That Bowie was still actually breaking new ground justified all this adoration and made looking back at the early seventies, for the time being, anyway, less of a slippery slope than it would soon become. The video for “Ashes to Ashes” was completed over the course of three days. When it debuted on television, with MTV still a year shy of launching, the clip was like nothing anyone had ever seen, and the single became Bowie’s first UK number one since “Fame” a half decade earlier. The
Scary Monsters
album was well received too. Released in late summer of 1980, it opens and closes with “It’s No Game” (Parts 1 and 2). A sucking sound, like an airplane’s windows being unlocked midflight, is heard. An agitated woman (singer Michi Hirota, who can be seen on the sleeve of Sparks’ landmark
Kimono My House
album) begins a series of non sequiturs in Japanese (“… he’s literally tearing out his intestines …”) and Bowie screams about being insulted by fascists. It’s improbably thrilling where in lesser hands it would be some pretentious trash.

There are those who consider
Scary Monsters
Bowie’s last perfect album. There is certainly an energy that
Scary Monsters
possesses that many of his worthy “good” records (1995’s
Outside
, 2002’s
Heathen)
cannot claim. More accurately, it may be Bowie’s last “young” record. That’s to say his last perfectly confident statement, the final time that David Bowie’s search for the “new” in our world of sound feels pure, as opposed to betraying itself, somewhere in its sequenced tracks, as a means to merely revive himself. “There is an opportunity to draw a tidy line there,” Charles Shaar Murray says.

There are tracks on
Scary Monsters
that vie with his best seventies work. “Up the Hill Backwards,” one of the album’s four singles, has an acoustic Bo Diddley beat and decidedly un-Diddley-like lyrics about tabloid culture (Bowie’s divorce from Angie was finalized the year of the album’s release). The title track finds Bowie singing in his Michael Caine
Cockney voice for the first time since the late seventies. “Fashion” has a great dissonant guitar, courtesy of Fripp, and a bass line that wouldn’t be out of place on a post-punk effort by Gang of Four or the Slits.

Scary Monsters
was another American Top 20 hit record, but Bowie was not through keeping critics who might have been prone to relegate him to the past on their toes and remained, as Charles Shaar Murray had pointed out, a “moving target.” How else does one explain the sudden decision to take over the role of John Merrick in the touring company of the Victorian gothic tragedy
The Elephant Man
and open it on Broadway? Bowie was, after all, one of rock’s more classically handsome stars. Much discussion commenced over how on earth he could convincingly inhabit a horribly deformed sideshow freak, which was likely the point. The other key factor had to have been the pure challenge of it all.

“No one with a history of back trouble should attempt the part of Merrick as contorted. Anyone playing the part of Merrick should be advised to consult a physician about the problems of sustaining any unnatural or twisted position,” a warning in the print version of Bernard Pomerance’s play reads. Bowie was a student of movement since the days of Lindsay Kemp’s traveling show
Pierrot in Turquoise
. He might have connected with the Merrick character on an empathetic and emotional level as well. He too had been an attraction, a performer many people immediately dismissed as freaky (recall Aretha Franklin’s Grammy acceptance speech). Merrick was erudite, sensitive and quick witted, as intellectually sharp as he was physically frightening and fascinating. This juxtaposition appealed to Bowie as well. Bowie’s tormented memories of MainMan and Tony Defries might have had a hand in his unpredictable choice to take on the stage play. Merrick was managed by “Ross,” a vulgar individual who had no real respect for his client’s intellect and chewed on and on about “tuppences” he received from gawkers, also oblivious to the real man underneath all the grotesque folds and boils.

While recording
Scary Monsters
in New York City, Bowie’d met with the play’s director Jack Hofsiss to discuss the part. As with his first major film role in
The Man Who Fell to Earth
, Bowie would have to prove himself to investors and the established crew. And as ever, Bowie did so with strict professionalism and commitment. According to Hofsiss he impressed the director with his new take on the character. He would play
Merrick as a streetwise Cockney with a wry delivery, not the slurping hamminess some less intuitive artist might have gone to.

“His perceptions were right on the money,” Hofsiss has said. Bowie and Corinne Schwab flew to London to view the body cast of the actual John Merrick at the London Hospital archives and his hood and coat sketches and models he’d built. “David asked pertinent questions … he wanted to know how Merrick walked, how he spoke,” P. G. Nunn, the hospital official, has said. “I told him he could not have run because he had no hips. And there was a great distortion of the mouth because the tongue was thick and pushed to one side.”

As with his role as mere keyboardist on the 1977 Lust for Life tour, David found it easy to become a working part of a larger production, keeping his ego in check and collaborating with cast and crew toward a greater end during the arduous rehearsal period. After playing in Denver and Chicago,
The Elephant Man
was the most talked-about show of Broadway’s fall season, thanks to good word of mouth for Bowie’s performance, which found him disappearing into Merrick as deftly as he had disappeared into the Turkish section of West Berlin after his L.A. psychosis. While the Bowie name on the program ensured a sold-out run, Bowie the artist could find anonymity in this role and, as he had with
Low
, deliver something wholly inventive. View what little footage is available from the Broadway run and it’s uncanny. Moments after his startling appearance, one quickly loses track of “David Bowie,” international superstar, onstage. He acts mostly with his eyes and body and uses his gift for mimicry to affect Merrick’s impaired speech. “I completely forgot that I was watching Bowie,” says then rival Gary Numan, who took in a performance while on tour in New York. “He became this grotesque figure and I gave him a genuine heartfelt standing ovation at the end of it.”

Reviewing his performance in the
New York Times
, John Corry wrote, “When it was announced that David Bowie would play the title role in
The Elephant Man
, it was not unnatural to think he had been cast simply for the use of his name. Fortunately, he is a good deal more than that, and as John Merrick, the Elephant Man, he is splendid.”

Fans clamored to catch a view of Bowie as he walked the short trip from his hotel to the theater every day. Security became an issue. Hofsiss has stated, “David had to isolate himself to come down from the performance
and avoid the crowds outside the stage door. A lot of theaters on Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth streets had connecting passageways, so David could exit the theater several ways.”