FEATURE:
Always in Fashion
PHOTO CREDITS (unless otherwise stated): David Bowie
Five Years: The Magnificent David Bowie
___________
I was not going to put out another feature…
regarding David Bowie but, as today (10th January) marks five years since his death, I want to do one final feature. There has been a lot of media coverage over the past couple of days because, on Friday, we celebrated Bowie’s seventy-fourth birthday. I want to quote from a couple of articles that have come out that explores Bowie’s legacy. I was struck by a feature about Bowie’s iconic photos and how, when you think about him, one realises that Bowie had this visual legacy – both in these incredible photographs and the way his different looks and reinventions have inspired future artists:
“Lady Gaga's character-shifting and costumes were predated by Ziggy and the Thin White Duke – a sartorial tribute that she often acknowledges. Meanwhile, the recent hand-wringing over Harry Styles's dress on the cover of Vogue regularly neglects the fact that Bowie did it first in 1970, wearing a fetching floral dress designed by Michael Fish on the cover of The Man Who Sold the World. It's a game of dress-up that validated even his out-of-the-box projects, including playing the role of the Goblin King in cult 1980s fantasy film Labyrinth, narrating Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, and performing The Little Drummer Boy with Bing Crosby. He was an outsider who looked the role – let the man make art.
Throughout his career, too, these experimental shifts in his persona were signposted by getting in front of a camera. As documented in the newly published book David Bowie: Icon, which features shots of the star by 25 different photographers, Bowie always understood the power that photography would have in his world. While the images captured during his life are impressive to look back on now, even in the moment, it was clear to many photographers that they were making something special. Here we speak to a few of them to get their reflections on working with a creative legend.
PHOTO CREDIT: Janet Macoska
But while Bowie used the ability to tell a story through photographs, Janet Macoska believes that he also understood the effect he had on the people who took them. The Cleveland, Ohio-based photographer spent her teenage years photographing acts who regularly used the city to launch their US tours. When she first saw Bowie perform in 1974, she recalls initially being intimidated by the intensity of his stage presence and two-toned eyes, even though she treasures an ethereal, slightly out-of-focus shot from that first show. But when he returned in 1976, on a tour that didn't allow photographers, she was given the opportunity to photograph his stage set-up. In return she was allowed to sneak into the show, camera in tow, her rule-breaking "overlooked" by management.
I got a letter in the mail from Switzerland, and I didn't know anybody in Switzerland. It was from David thanking me for my gift – Janet Macoska
"I popped out every once in a while, to shoot a few photos, but David had two big gorilla guys on stage, one on each side of the stage," she recalls. "If he saw a camera, he would point at it, and the gorilla guys will come out and take your film. So there I am popping out, and he catches me at it. And he puts his hand out and just waves with a little 'No you didn't do that, shame on you!' And then he smiled and he called off the gorillas. And I shot the whole show! It was like being blessed".
I would recommend people read that entire BBC article, as it shows that David Bowie was such a collaborative photographic subject. I suppose other artists are like that, but I think imagery was so important to Bowie; in the sense that he wanted to make photos as powerful and moving as his music. I think a lot of the photos that we see of Bowie connected with so many people. Not only have various musicians striven to inject a bit of Bowie’s mystique, strangeness and beauty into their music/images…I feel Bowie has affected wider society, in terms of the L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ community and inspiring others to express themselves in a more open and different way. Another fascinating feature came from The Times. We hear from various people who knew Bowie and, more and more, one learns that he had these various sides and qualities:
“Iggy Pop worked with Bowie in 1971, when he produced Iggy and the Stooges’s third and final album, Raw Power (released in 1973) , and again in the late Seventies, when the pair relocated to Berlin and wrote some of their best material. It led to Pop’s atypically gentle China Girl becoming a hit for Bowie in 1983. “That was a quiet period, focused on the ostensible task,” Pop said of the Berlin years, when I spoke to him in 2019. “With the Stooges in England it was, ‘Where can we get a goddam hamburger?’ With Bowie in Berlin it was going to a club and having a few drinks. We were doing the things most guys that age do.”
“I met him at an after-hours club in New York called the Continental, David was at the back of the room by himself, drinking an orange juice,” says Nile Rodgers of Chic, who collaborated with Bowie in 1983 on Let’s Dance. “In order to figure out how to work together, we went to museums and people’s houses with extensive record collections. To my amazement, we liked a lot of the same stuff: avant-garde jazz like Cecil Taylor and Eric Dolphy, big band music, early rock’n’roll. The super-success of Let’s Dance made him feel strange, but deep down all artists want to touch as many people as possible. He definitely wanted Let’s Dance to be a hit.”
The aristocratic singer and fashion figure Daphne Guinness remembers Bowie as the ultimate autodidact. “We shared a love of second-hand bookshops and opera scores,” says Guinness, who became friends with Bowie in 2013 after they met at a party and she told him that the first single she bought was The Laughing Gnome. “It is unusual to meet someone who is interested in the leitmotifs to Tristan and Isolde and Götterdämmerung, let alone studies the dots on the page of the scores like they are Morse code. He was very encouraging when I started making albums, although he said my lyrics had a tendency to get too ‘Tennyson-y’. I would describe him as elegant, curious and very funny. It seems to me that the world went wrong the moment Bowie died.”
Five years after his death Bowie’s influence looms over our lives more than ever. You could argue that he achieved that final goal of going on for ever, but perhaps we shouldn’t deify him or take him too seriously. In Francis Whately’s documentary Bowie: The Last Five Years, the director asks him what he would most like to be remembered for. “I’d love people to believe,” he replies, “that I had really great haircuts”.
I would advise people to check out Bowie: Dancing Out in Space on BBC Radio 6 Music at 8 p.m., as it will be a fascinating show where leading figures from music, literature, philosophy, technology and comedy talk about the impact of Bowie on their lives. It is impossible to simplify and limit the words one says regarding Bowie’s influence. The more one reads about him and hears testimonies, the more you appreciate how his music and magic touched so many. Esquire investigated how one can hear and feel David Bowie in a lot of artists today:
“Bowie’s influence—his creative shape-shifting, meticulous blending of art and pop, embrace of fashion without surrendering songwriting discipline—was so pervasive during his lifetime that it can be tough to isolate his impact during these last five years. As rock has increasingly become an exercise in nostalgia, the bands he championed in his later years (LCD Soundsystem, Arcade Fire) have broken up or waned in impact. Visually- and conceptually-savvy artists like St. Vincent, Bjork, and Jack White certainly carry the torch, but even they have started to feel like holdovers from another era.
The Bowie DNA is obviously present in The Weeknd when he wears those unexplained face bandages or in Lady Gaga’s reinventions and costuming (though, as my teenage son cannily points out, Gaga’s grand pop gestures are really more Freddie Mercury than Bowie). But if his greatest contribution of all was to give a voice to the outcasts and misfits, to speak for those on society’s fringes and provide them a valued space in rock & roll, then the question is where do those freaky kids now turn?
Bowie surely would have loved and embraced this evolution, not just because of his lifelong championing of Black music (the sound of Blackstar was inspired by Kendrick Lamar’s jazz-inflected hip-hop), but because his entire career was dedicated to moving forward. This aspect of Bowie is documented in his most progressive statements and actions—from his prediction of streaming as the future of music to calling out MTV on its racist programming policies to his sale of “Bowie Bonds” anticipating the current acquisition frenzy on the publishing side of the music business—which social media is quick to cherry-pick and keep these clips in regular rotation”.
I will bring things to a close soon, but I wanted to quote from a great article from The Guardian that discusses how Bowie continues to uplift us five years after his death. I was particularly captured by how restless he was regarding art and literature; how feverish his imagination was – and how it kept collecting ideas and fed that into his work:
“Curator Beth Greenacre, who managed Bowie’s art collection for 16 years until his death, told Harper’s Bazaar in 2016 that he “collected ideas, thoughts … they all fed into his life. He would look at one artist and it would lead him to another artist, which would lead him to a book, which would lead him to a theory, which would lead him to a philosophical text, which would then lead him back to another artist.”
That’s the thing: life, for Bowie, was a series of encounters with people and things that made change possible, not a series of transactions designed to get one over on other people. I’ve missed him more than ever since he died because, seen in the whole, his life stands in rebuke to the philistinism, cynicism and bad faith that’s come to dominate public life.
He wanted to keep learning, and wanted us to keep learning. Bowie would share reading lists, playlists, lyrics saturated with cultural allusions. In the words of songwriter Edwyn Collins, speaking in response to the news of Bowie’s death: “He was warm; you could walk around with him in your head all day and it comforted you”.
I know that is a slightly random collection of thoughts and articles about Bowie, but I wanted to show how amazing the man was and how far and wide his influence has reached. I would encourage people to seek out as much as they can in the way of documentaries and radio tributes. Even though David Bowie has been gone for five years, his influence is everywhere! I think we will be dissecting and discussing his genius for generations to come. There was truly nobody else like him. It seems that this divine star was…
BEAMED from another planet.