David Bowie: The Last Five Years, BBC Two
From Reality to finality: Bowie's 70th birthday is celebrated with a searching look at his late renaissance
It’s been 12 months since the news guy wept and told us: David Bowie, ever out in front, became the first to depart in the year of musical mortality 2016. After the initial lamentations, the memorial tributes have been a mixed bag. Best was the life story stitched together for Radio 4 from a vast back catalogue of audio interviews. Less impactfully there was also the well-meaning misfire at the Proms, plus a messy Dadaist meta-biog rushed out by Paul Morley.
Albums of the Year: Blackstar - David Bowie
An ending that could have been a new beginning
A year on, what can be said about Blackstar that hasn’t been said already? The answer is: what I have to say about it. That’s not to claim any special insights, it’s simply because the artist designed it that way. Even though Bowie said not a word during the decade leading up to his death, the messages explicit, implicit and fancifully imagined were all there for the taking. One such message was the little blank notebook included with all the other paraphernalia in The Next Day Special Edition. Its blankness clearly said; there is no cohesive meaning to this record other than the one you bring to it, so you join the dots and fill in the gaps and thus complete the Work.
And so it was with Blackstar too; Bowie running just ahead of us through the darkening woods, chuckling to himself, scattering clues; Crowley, A Clockwork Orange, cancer lesions, an old Elvis song, a dead Major Tom, dying stars – a deconstructed collage of self-referential reference points and filched symbols to confound and delight anyone wanting some serious fun. But it would have all been so much hot air and cool sax if the end result hadn’t been so gripping, moving, scary and surprising. A year on from when Blackstar first blotted out the sun, I still find myself listening to it with an attentiveness I’ve not applied to any other record in decades. Yes, The Next Day was a wonderful gift too, but in retrospect it only sated old appetites rather than create new ones. Blackstar on the other hand rewires one’s brain.
There are no accidents on a David Bowie record
And therein lies the real tragedy of losing Bowie so young (yes, young); we don’t get to go on the new musical journey this remarkable album signalled so clearly and so brightly. Although the song craft never went away (even on Tonight and Never Let Me Down), DB’s music was never more captivating than when he just grabbed the reins and held on tight. Bowie’s decision to work with a contemporary jazz band without for a moment having them compromise what they do was an important starting point. Then he and producer Tony Visconti selected what they needed from what must have been a dizzying wealth of material and forged something wholly new and uncanny, something that was neither jazz nor rock, just a fresh start.
So, what have I written in my hypothetical little blank notebook? Just a few disjointed observations really. How the multi-tracked vocals that form the bridge between the first and second section of the title track sound like a gale blowing through a gutted church. How the blackstar black humour of the yelped line, "Where the fuck did Monday go?" in “Girl Loves Me” says both nothing and everything. And how the old man in the hospital bed who drops his phone and sings, "Aint that just me?" in “Lazarus” is the young man in “Sweet Thing” who once sung to his lover, "Does that make you smile, isn't that me?" Then there’s the anxious breathing at the beginning of “Tis A Pity She Was A Whore”. Listened to on headphones it creates the unsettling aural illusion that it’s me standing in that vocal booth early in 2015, digging deep for the emotional mindset I needed to perform the chilling vocal that follows.
There are no accidents on a David Bowie record (apart from the happy ones that are taken full advantage of), so I feel sure that the inclusion of that breathing is as much an artistic statement as the tape unspooling at the end of Scary Monsters. I can think of no other moment on a record that so uncannily places the listener inside the head of a particular human being on a given day. But perhaps what’s most remarkable about Blackstar overall is just how quickly those 40 minutes pass. This album swallows up time. It’s a cloying fever-dream that takes in sinister religious rituals, spousal murder and deathbed ruminations and doesn’t let up until the heartrending sunrise of “Dollar Days” and “I Can’t Give Everything Away.” No, Bowie didn’t give everything away, but on Blackstar he perhaps gave away more than he knew.
Two More Essential Albums from 2016
Elza Soares – The Woman at the End of the World
Beyoncé - Lemonade
Gig of the Year
Eska at the Roundhouse
Track of the Year
Beyoncé – All Night
Lazarus, King's Cross Theatre
David Bowie musical crosses the Atlantic, its intrigue intact
When David Bowie first met with the producer Robert Fox to discuss Lazarus back in 2013, you now have to wonder if he was seriously contemplating his own mortality. The clue, of course, lies in the title, and that of Bowie's extraordinary last album, Blackstar.
Bowie/Collector, Sotheby's
From Tintoretto to Basquiat, a connoisseur's collection goes on show then on sale
David Bowie needs no introduction, yet he kept one aspect of his life largely hidden away: his art collecting. Now Sotheby’s, which is auctioning off around 400 items of his private art collection in a three-part sale on 10 and 11 November, is holding a very special exhibition, lasting just 10 days. The exhibition and the extensive catalogues that accompany the sale provide an exceptional opportunity to see the works together before they are dispersed and to look at how much the collection reflects the man (and sometimes his music).
Prom 19: David Bowie Prom
Laura Mvula, John Cale, Marc Almond et al reimagine the starman's inimitable songbook
“I’m here, I’m here, I’m here,” sang John Cale in the droning voice of Major Tom. Whether the spirit of David Bowie was indeed hovering over the Albert Hall for this impromptu memorial late-night Prom is not easily answered. The shape-shifting Bowie who stayed ahead of the game was honoured in a set lasting nearly two hours and covering 47 years of music-making from 1969 to 2016. But anyone hoping to catch a spacemobile back to 1973 was not to be humoured.
CD: Iggy Pop - Post Pop Depression
The mighty Ig takes on death with his new supergroup
From the late Eighties to the early 2000s, Iggy Pop turned out a succession of sassy rock albums that ranged in quality but usually contained a greasy, dirt-ingrained gem or three. These albums appeared with a garage-punk lack of self-consciousness, doing the rock’n’roll job like a lifer born to it. More recently, however, when not in Stooges mode, the Ig has gone adventuring. He made a couple of albums themed around jazz and French chanson and his latest is also a statement album.
When Bowie Came to Beckenham
In 1969, Mary Finnigan took in a lodger at her flat in Beckenham. The name was Bowie. David Bowie
This extract from Mary Finnigan’s book Psychedelic Suburbia describes events leading up to the creation of the Beckenham Arts Lab, during the early period after David moved into her flat in Foxgrove Road, Beckenham in April 1969. The book was published by Jorvik Press on 8 January 2016 – three days before David died in New York.
In early May, Hutch comes to stay for a few days and adds the dimension of his refined guitar skill to David’s compositions. David can strum to useful effect, but he has not learned to finger pick.
theartsdesk Radio Show: Bowie Tribute
theartsdesk's radio tribute to the man who fell to earth
That purveyor of everything from crazy cosmic jive and plastic soul to epic disco and elegant Berlin ambient gloom made a hell of an exit last week. His last release, his “parting gift” Blackstar, was a dazzling curtain bow unlike any other. He was a brilliant magpie, smuggling all kinds of ideas from Kabuki and Nietzsche to avant-jazz and cut-ups into impeccable, usually subversive, pop.
When Bowie and Boyd hoaxed the art world
Nat Tate was a very Modern Painter, invented by William Boyd with the rock star's encouragement
In 1994 the art magazine Modern Painters invited fresh blood onto its editorial board. The new intake included a novelist, William Boyd, and a rock star, David Bowie. "That’s how I got to know him," says Boyd. "We’d sit at the table with all these art critics and art experts feeling like new boys slightly having to prove ourselves. He interviewed Balthus, he interviewed Tracey Emin. He wrote for the magazine effectively."