LIVING UP TO BOWIE

The punks turned out for David Bowie at Earls Court. It was the last night of his first British tour in two years. Why were they there? One had come, he said, because Bowie was definitely six years ahead of the punk movement.

There seemed to be an obvious and immediate attraction between Bowie and the punks, just as there is between Bowie and the “intellectuals” and Bowie and the art school tradition: all to do with using fashion, acting out roles, representing an anti-establishment stance against the rock ’n’ roll hierarchy. Bowie is both surrealistic and accessible; always shifting into next year before most people have caught up with this.

Fans had spent half their holiday, up to 300 pounds, and a lot of attention to their clothes through this tour. A hairdresser had seen the stills from the unreleased second Bowie film Just A Gigolo and had already adopted the early Prussian off-duty Bowie screen uniform; a punkette had changed her name by deed poll to Ziggy Zowie. Two boys with red hair cut in the Ziggy style were beginning to show dark roots; another turned up with an Aladdin Sane flash painted on his face. One fan said dyeing hair was definitely out now: “I stopped when he did. He’s maturing and I want to grow with him.” Bowie said that the one thing he’d enjoyed most about the tour was not having to “play” a character.

17,000 fans (the biggest audience London gigs can cope with) could witness, if they cared to, where Bowie is now. Whether they believe or care about his protestations of dropping the mask they will definitely greet the next Bowie tour looking like this ...

His short blond (naturally) hair is immaculately cut close to his head, he wears a plain white shirt and big baggy trousers. He lives and records in Berlin now, engrossed, it is said, in German expressionism. When he came to London a couple of years back he said what Britain needed was another Hitler. No wonder I feel edgy. This may all conspire to give him the image of a young pre40’s German worker. Healthy, efficient, an austere propaganda poster for the true Aryan male.

As a woman I am both alienated and attracted

by Bowie’s presence. The harsh Germanic impression is threatening yet there is an overt sexuality about the way he holds his body, even though his movements are minimal, that demands a certain admiration. It’s not the aggressive sexuality of Jagger and the Stones which is so against women. Bowie’s bisexuality may have something to do with the non-threatening way he uses his body. Yet his beauty is such that it can sometimes mock me in the same way magazine models do. It is the elegance of Bacall, Verushka, the classic bone structure that makes me aware in my seat of my hastily thrown-on jeans and uncombed hair; the fact that I don’t share that confidence or aloofness in my own physical make-up.

The trouble is that with it all is a certain vulnerability that I can recognise, at once artful and unself-conscious. I have a horrible habit of finding that quality endearing.

Towards the end of his set he sings the Bertold Brecht/Kurt Weill number “Alabama Song.” The Doors once did it, but the audience do not have immediate recognition. Bowie’s voice has just the right amount of mournful pain and steely desperation for the work of the great German socialist writers: “Show me the way to the next whiskey bar/Oh don’t ask why/If we don’t find the next whiskey bar/I tell you we shall die”. . .

Over on the other side of town, seven days later, in a tiny theatre called The Open Space where the audience capacity is 70, the extraordinary seven-piece Mike Westbrook Brass Band are presenting a jazz cabaret called “Goose Sauce.” The mainstay of this cabaret is a piece of musical theatre in the Brecht /Weill tradition: “Mama Chicago.”

Kate Westbrook wears a tight black skirt, white shirt; a small silver hat with a black rose and a black veil adorns her short blond (naturally) immaculately cut hair. Her face is boney to the point of harshness. She wears high heeled shoes which make her walk with long-legged elegance and deliberation. She puts down her tenor horn to sing a torch song called “Shipwrecked.” The lyrics are about the era of American prohibition: “We may be drinking gasoline/But, oh, don’t panic”.

Since Bowie has been recording in the Berlin bunker (for Low and Heroes) the biggest influence over his music has undoubtedly been Brian Eno’s experimental jazz background. Since Eno left Roxy Music, his role as both Bowie’s arranger and co-musician have allowed the writer to produce a new style which, while nodding a debt to his tradition of rock/soul/folk, moulds them in a highly stylised individualistic way. It’s this, says someone I can’t disagree with, that makes Bowie the singularly most important rock star of the 70’s. On stage Bowie is feted by audience and electronics alike—David Hemmings’ enormous cameras track his every move. I am reminded of the sequence in The Man Who Fell To Earth where Bowie sits endlessly transfixed by the bank of TV screens. Once he was the endless watcher, now he is endlessly watched and observed by the screen itself.

Both sets of musicians distance themselves from their audience by adopting a certain stance through their songs. When Bowie cries out for the next whiskey bar, it’s not the man in search of a drink he personifies, but the desperation of the situation. Brecht’s personification of the working class, its frustration in pre-30’s Germany, is wound up in the search for a formal opiate; Kate Westbrook is not a gasoline drinking whore; Phil Minton’s demented vocal as “Mama Chicago’s favourite son” is a formal acting out of despair. Both represent the traditions of theatre.

Earls Court’s huge auditorium fixes Bowie on stage in a single position. Audience to artist. Every major rock group turns the lights on an audience in a “you are us” gesture at some time; it doesn’t often work. When the lights moved ‘round on the final concert, Bowie waved. Each audience pocket responded to the spotlight sharing his narcissism, acting out their role as audience, wanting him to see them as they have been watching him. It does little but, for me, increase the sense of alienation and distancing I felt right through the concert. I admired at a distance, regarding Bowie as a spectacle, a diversion. I never wanted to be part of it all.

At “Goose Sauce” I found my pen—I’d given up taking notes—was banging on my wine glass in time to the band’s encore. Of course there is the sense of physical proximity but it is more than that. I would be impressed but passive if Bowie was in such intimate surroundings; the Westbrook band have pulled me into their set from my sixth row seat as an active participant.

David Bowie throws his sailor hat into the audience; Kate Westbrook throws her carnation. From where I sit at the Open Space I can actually see the ankle bone of her finely poised foot.

Originally published November 1978