Setting Sail for Uncharted Waters: Creative Counsel from David Bowie
‘I was determined, ever since I was 16, that I would have the greatest adventure that any one person could ever have. And I set my sails in the general direction of uncharted waters. I put myself through everything, absolutely everything that came along. It was very important for me to expand my horizons and to see just how near the line I could get.’
David Bowie
I recently watched the splendid film about David Bowie by Brett Morgen, ‘Moonage Daydream’ (2022).
It’s not a conventional biographical documentary. Rather it is a cinematic tapestry woven from sequences of Bowie in performance, in interviews and on his travels; with news footage of the time, and imagery that suggests the themes that interested him: isolation, marginalisation and change; fragmented modern living, a world in chaos and space travel.
You get a real understanding of Bowie’s personal and artistic odyssey; his considerable intelligence, wit and charisma.
‘I hope none of us are static throughout our lives. I guess one has a formed personality from quite an early age. But it is tempered and subject to change. We all to a certain extent create our lives and create our culture daily.’
In the midst of the Ziggy Stardust UK tour a reporter quizzes a distraught young woman, sitting on a step near the stage door of a concert hall. She sports a blue jacket, purple tie, bold nail varnish and a Bowie lapel badge.
Reporter: What are you so upset about?
Fan: I want to see him. They said he was coming round the back. I’ve been waiting ages to see him.
Reporter: Why are you so upset?
Fan: He’s smashing.
Above all, ‘Moonage Daydream’ offers an insight into Bowie’s ideas and working processes. This was a man who thought deeply about identity, creativity and the human condition.
‘At the turn of the twentieth century Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed that god was dead and that man had killed him. This created an arrogance within man that he himself was god. But as god, all he could seem to produce was disaster. That led to a terrifying confusion: for if we could not take the place of god, how could we fill the space we had created within ourselves?’
Let us consider the lessons Bowie offers anyone working in a creative business.
'Wake up you sleepy head,
Put on some clothes, shake up your bed.
Put another log on the fire for me.
I've made some breakfast and coffee.
I look out my window, what do I see?
A crack in the sky and a hand reaching down to me.
All the nightmares came today,
And it looks as though they're here to stay.’
‘Oh! You Pretty Things'
1. Escape and Get Out
David Jones was born into a lower middle class family in Brixton in 1947. When he was 6 they moved to Bromley, a London suburb that the young boy found incredibly stifling.
‘In suburbia you’re given the impression that nothing culturally belongs to you, that you are sort of in this wasteland. And I think there’s a passion for most people that have an iota of curiosity about them to escape and get out.’
From the outset Jones considered himself an outsider.
‘I think that I felt often – ever since I was a teenager – so adrift, and so not part of everyone else… [I felt] very much on the outside of everything.’
Jones found solace in American rock’n’roll and modern jazz. He studied art, music and design, and learned to play the saxophone.
2. Find the Individual within Yourself
Jones’ half-brother Terry, who was 10 years older, introduced the frustrated teenager to Kerouac and Coltraine, Buddhism and Beat poetry. Terry’s recommendations prompted Jones to consider his identity and role in the world.
‘Once upon a time your father, my father, everybody’s father, wanted a good job with a good income, or reasonable income, some chance of promotion to secure their family life. And that’s where it ended. But now people want a role in society. They want to feel that they have a position. They want to be an individual. And I think there’s a lot of searching to find the individual within oneself.’
Terry suffered from schizophrenia and was eventually hospitalized. Jones was prompted to reflect on his own mental health.
David Bowie COURTESY OF DAVID BOWIE
3. Adopt a Grasshopper Mentality
Jones formed his first band, the Konrads, at the age of 15. He subsequently performed in a series of mostly blues-based combos. The King Bees, the Manish Boys, the Lower Third, the Buzz, the Riot Squad.
None of these enterprises met with much success. Jones took on the stage name David Bowie, developed an acoustic folk-rock sound and released a solo album. When this failed to chart, he applied himself to learning dance, mime and avant-garde theatre from Lindsay Kemp.
‘Rather than being pinned down, my momentum was to hit and run very fast. Once I’d done something and said it, drop it and move on.’
It’s striking how Bowie was consistently thwarted in his early creative endeavours. But all the time he was experimenting: learning more about music, performance, the business and himself.
‘I’ve got a grasshopper sort of mind, and I can’t resist bringing things to a conclusion, and saying that’s a piece in itself and now I’ll move onto something else. That’s a freedom-giving umbrella. It gives me a chance to do anything I want – successfully or unsuccessfully – without being tied down.’
'They say your life is going very well.
They say you sparkle like a different girl.
But something tells me that you hide,
When all the world is warm and tired,
You cry a little in the dark.
Well so do I.
I'm not quite sure what you're supposed to say,
But I can see it's not OK.’
‘Letter to Hermione’
4. Deny Dualities
Bowie was also exploring his sexuality. He was bisexual and happy to discuss it. Throughout his life he took against labels and simplistic dualities.
‘From micro to macro, from yin to yang, from male to female, there is no scissor cut, no absolutes.’
In one TV interview Russell Harty drew attention to his flamboyant platform shoes.
Interviewer: Are those men’s shoes or women’s shoes or bisexual shoes?
Bowie: They’re shoe shoes, silly.
5. Question All the Established Values
Finally, in 1969, Bowie had his first UK hit with 'Space Oddity’, released just ahead of the Apollo 11 launch.
'This is Major Tom to ground control.
I've left forevermore,
And I'm floating in a most peculiar way,
And the stars look very different today.
For here am I sitting in a tin can,
Far above the world,
The planet Earth is blue and there's nothing left to do.’
'Space Oddity'
However, ‘Space Oddity’ did not lead to sustained success, and Bowie was forced back to the drawing board. On a tour of the USA in 1971, he came up with a plan to invent ‘the ultimate pop idol,’ a fusion of the personality of Iggy Pop with the music of Lou Reed and a bold theatrical presentation.
‘I wanted to define the archetype messiah rock star. I used the trappings of kabuki theatre, mind technique and fringe New York music.’
In 1972 Bowie introduced Ziggy Stardust to the world with a flamboyant live show and an album, 'The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars', that created a glam rock paradigm.
Ziggy looked like no other pop star. He sported knee-length boots and orange-red feather cut. He donned a metallic jacket with jagged epaulettes. He strutted across the stage in a colourful, figure-hugging knitted leotard, in a short silk kimono. He was extraordinary.
Ziggy provided Bowie with a vehicle with which he could challenge everything that had gone before.
‘I think we took it on our shoulders that we were creating the twenty first century in 1971. We wanted to just blast everything in the past, question all the established values, all the taboos. Everything is rubbish and all rubbish is wonderful.’
'Sailors fighting in the dance hall.
Oh man, look at those cavemen go.
It's the freakiest show.
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?’
David Bowie photographed by MICK ROCK – On board the QE2, Southampton, UK, January 1973
6. Put Yourself in Danger
At last Bowie had the critical and commercial triumph he had sought for so long. He scored a golden run of hits: from the Ziggy Stardust album, from its predecessor ‘Hunky Dory’ and its successor ‘Aladdin Sane.’
But the fame took its toll. Bowie found it difficult to separate his extravagant onstage creation from his private offstage self. What’s more, he didn’t want to be tied to a formula. In 1973 at a performance at the Hammersmith Odeon, he announced Ziggy’s retirement.
‘If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being. Go a little out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.’
Changing tack at the height of his success was clearly brave. But it was a conscious decision that Bowie would repeat throughout his career.
‘I put myself in dangerous situations. I put myself in any situation which I feel I can’t cope with… It’s sort of trying to strengthen myself.’
Bowie determined that he needed a new environment and fresh stimulus. In 1974 he moved to the United States, settling in Los Angeles.
Interviewed at the back of a limousine making its way through the California desert, Bowie, pale faced and wearing a black fedora, takes a sip from a half-gallon carton of low-fat milk.
‘There’s a fly floating in my milk. He’s a foreign body in it. And he’s getting a lot of milk. That’s kind of how I felt. A foreign body here, and I couldn’t help but soak it up.’
7. Create Micro-Worlds Inside Your Mind
Bowie’s time in the United States was incredibly fertile. It produced the apocalyptic vision of ‘Diamond Dogs’ (1974); it led to the ‘plastic soul’ of ‘Young Americans’ (1975); and in ‘Station to Station’ (1976) it introduced a new persona, the unfeeling ‘Thin White Duke.’
‘I’ve never been sure of my own personality…I’m a collector and I’ve always just seemed to collect personalities.’
Bowie also performed his first lead role in a movie, ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’ (1976), playing an alien who succumbs to human vices.
Throughout this period Bowie was coming to terms with his lifelong sense of solitude.
‘Thematically I’ve always dealt with isolation in everything I’ve written… [The isolated individual] tends to create a micro-world inside himself. And it’s that peculiar part of the human mind that fascinates me: the small universes that can be created inside the human mind.’
Fundamentally Bowie was exploring his own identity, role and purpose.
‘I’ve spent an awful lot of my life actually looking for myself and understanding what I existed for, what was it that made me really happy in life and who exactly I was, who are the parts of myself I was trying to hide from.’
8. Put Together Elements that Wouldn’t Naturally Be Good Bedfellows
Around this time Bowie adopted a compositional technique from the writer William S Burroughs. It entailed cutting up existing texts and rearranging them in order to generate new meanings.
‘I guess I’m trying to articulate these mysterious corners of the mind where there exist grains of truth that we don’t often touch on, because we don’t have the words to capture them. So I’ll write on three or four different subject matters and then integrate them together by cutting them up.’
The cut-up technique chimed with Bowie’s conviction that, despite out best efforts to create coherent narratives, for the most part we live fragmented lives in a world of chaos.
‘People, especially in a city context, think in fragments… It’s a labyrinthine existence that we live, and so it makes sense for me to put together elements in a song which wouldn’t naturally be good bedfellows.’
'Give me more
Than one caress,
Satisfy this
Hungriness.
Let the wind
Blow through your heart,
For wild is the wind,
Wild is the wind.’
‘Wild is the Wind’ (D Tiomkin, N Washington)
9. Challenge Yourself with Change
Sadly Bowie’s time in the States was also characterised by addiction and poor mental and physical health. He needed to get away.
‘I got to the point in Los Angeles where I got very tired with my method of writing and I wanted to invent a new musical language… I knew I had to get to an environment that was totally different to Los Angeles, and so I thought of the most arduous city I could think of, and it was West Berlin.’
In 1976 Bowie moved to Berlin, renting a modest apartment above an auto parts shop. This new location offered relative anonymity, access to a vibrant experimental music scene and a chance to clean up.
‘I went naked in Berlin. I really did try and strip down my life to what I believed to be absolute essentials, so that I could build up again everything that I thought that I had lost.’
Bowie was always prepared to challenge himself with change.
‘Well, an awful lot of changes with my musical career were challenges to myself. I have to feel that I’m stepping on new ground, that the ice beneath the feet is very thin. Any second I could crack it and plunge through and drown.’
10. Find Other Outsiders
Though an independent spirit, Bowie had always been curious about other people’s beliefs and ideas, and throughout his career he collaborated with fellow outsiders. Producer Tony Visconti had worked with him since 1969. Mick Ronson’s guitar work was critical to the Ziggy sound. And John Lennon and guitarist Carlos Alomar co-wrote the 1975 single ‘Fame.’
‘I’ve been so eclectic all my life. I’d been admiring so many different people and so many different things that they’d done. I feel that I owe so many for the way that I think and do things. I guess anybody who’s had the integrity to always work outside the system has always appealed to me.’
In Berlin Bowie shared an apartment with Iggy Pop, co-writing and producing the former Stooge’s solo albums, ‘The Idiot’ and ‘Lust for Life.’
Bowie also approached producer Brian Eno.
‘I contacted Brian Eno who is definitely one of the keenest brains in modern music and I said: ‘Look Brian, I need to know some processes and new methods of writing. Please help me. Otherwise I’m packing it in.’’
Bowie had a clear but challenging brief for Eno.
‘What I’m trying to do is mould the traditional methods of rock’n’roll with newer processes, trying to find a new form of language.’
11. Adopt New Processes
Eno prompted Bowie to follow a number of formal rules. For example:
Faced with a choice, do both.
Convert a melodic element into a rhythmic element.
Change instrument roles.
Through these rules Bowie endeavoured to shed light on his unconscious realm.
‘It probably touches areas of emotion that aren’t normally dwelt upon, because they were arrived at other than by the regular channels of creative thought.’
This period produced Bowie’s revolutionary Berlin Trilogy: the minimalist ambient ‘cold war’ music of ‘Low’ (1977) and ‘Heroes’ (1977); and his response to new wave, ‘Lodger’ (1979).
'I, I will be king
And you, you will be queen.
Though nothing will drive them away,
We can beat them, just for one day.
We can be heroes, just for one day.
‘Heroes'
12. Follow the Thread of Meaning
As the ‘80s dawned Bowie kept on the move.
‘I’ve never bought a house. I still have no intention of buying one… Because with me the way I live is very much also part of what produces my work. So I have to keep examining my life to make sure that I’m in constant change and not getting too bloated with philosophic opulence. Keep throwing bits and pieces away. And to change countries is one way of doing that.’
The album ‘Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)’ (1980) affirmed his influence on, and his alliance with, the emergent New Romantic scene in London, and provided Bowie’s first innovative contribution to the video age.
Bowie found himself in a very positive place.
‘I think it’s an heroic act to be able to obtain enthusiasm and joy from the actual process of living from day to day.’
Accordingly he set out to create music that was simple, warm and emotionally uplifting.
‘I believe that there is a thread of meaning running through my life at the moment that I have no wish to break. And I believe it is leading somewhere fulfilling and positive.’
This resulted in 1983’s ‘Let's Dance’, a hugely popular album, and one that Bowie toured with great success all over the world.
‘I don’t begrudge any artist for getting an audience. I’m sorry. I never found that poverty meant purity.’
13. Don’t Give People What They Like, Make Them Like What You Like
Before too long Bowie became uncomfortable with the trappings of mainstream stardom: the stadium shows, MTV videos, promotional tours and corporate sponsorships. He realised that he had compromised his creative soul.
‘Even though it was enormously successful, there was no growth going on at all… I never wanted to do this. I never wanted to be out there pleasing people. I wanted to be really stubborn and have people like what I like, not give them what they like.’
Bowie determined that henceforth he would avoid the middle of the road.
‘If there’s an area that I think an audience I know would really like, I just remember back to how much I hate the centre of the social strata – how I hate being drawn into the middle, to the middle of the road in anything, to that which is most popular.’
Ralph Gatti/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
14. Keep Searching
Bowie embraced change once more.
‘My work as an artist has always been to do with transition. The nature and study of change in our particular era is most important because never in our history has there been such a rapid curve of change.’
He decided it was time to be part of a group again, and so formed and fronted Tin Machine. He subsequently experimented with hip hop, jungle, drum and bass and electronica. He collaborated with a wide range of contemporary artists and created soundtracks to movies and to a computer game. He curated festivals and wrote a musical.
Bowie found that with maturity came a kind of liberation.
‘There’s a certain buoyancy that you can develop as you get older. If you are capable of absorbing that it’s a finite life and a finite existence…And I think if you are really honest with that reality, you can have a kind of freedom – artistically, spiritually and emotionally – that you don’t have when you’re young.’
In 2014 Bowie was diagnosed with liver cancer, but he kept his condition private. His final album ‘Blackstar’, released on 8 January 2016, his 69th birthday, was met with critical acclaim. He died two days later. His long time producer Tony Visconti revealed that Bowie had planned the album as a ‘parting gift.’
Interviewer: Do you indulge in any form of worship?
Bowie: Erm life. I love life very much indeed.
To many of us Bowie’s death seemed untimely. He was still so vital and current. But he had lived a full and rewarding life. He had taken from it and given to it everything he could.
‘I’ve had an incredible life. It’s been amazing. I’d love to do it again.’
To the end Bowie kept on searching.
‘I’d be really scared of finding that I’d got somewhere. Because for me art is about searching, and if you come to a place where you think you’ve made a discovery, god, that could be really demoralising. I think the search is the thing.’
'Where are we now?
Where are we now?
The moment you know
You know, you know.
As long as there's sun.
As long as there's rain.
As long as there's fire.
As long as there's me.
As long as there's you.’
‘Where Are We Now?'
No. 405
