David Bowie Forum

[size=0px]Golden years
By Michael Dwyer and Gareth Gorman
21 November 2002
With Heathen receiving critical acclaim and a new Greatest Hits album, MICHAEL DWYER catches up with the man himself while GARETH GORMAN tackles the back catalogue of the Thin White Duke
The art of prescience used to be half the game for David Bowie. "The future belongs to those who can hear it coming" went one of his canny 70s aphorisms.
Perhaps his most remarkable premonition concerned the death of his own muse.
His last great single, Ashes to Ashes, found him recalling Major Tom for public burial, just as the decade he ruled drew to a close. The accompanying album, Scary Monsters... and Super Creeps, was iconoclastic to the point of abdication.
When Bowie reappeared as a beige-suited R&B crooner with Let's Dance in 1983, he'd dumped his long-serving and resourceful producer Tony Visconti and, by his own damning admission, "started to appeal to people who bought Phil Collins albums".
He's back and he's on form  better late than never. Heathen is the album that should have followed Scary Monsters 22 years ago. It finds both Visconti and old-fashioned songcraft back in favour. It also reeks of futuristic fear and foreboding. If you didn't know him better, you'd guess he didn't put pen to paper until 12 September.
"The first thing I heard when I started playing the material to people was, 'Wow, how prescient,' and all that," he replies a tad impatiently, gazing at the Manhattan skyline from the 35th floor of Sony Music's VIP club. "Well it's not. My albums have not necessarily been the happiest albums in the world.
I think there may be two or three of them you could have taken, had they been recorded just before 9/11, you could have said, 'Ooh, wow!' But no, it's not [related to] that. It's just there is a particular kind of angst that is contained in my work.
I think I'm very good at non-specific nagging fear. [He grins] I feel it very strongly, that low-level tension that I understand we all have, and I'm good at kinda capturing that in musical form. I'm not very good with overall world pictures or politicisation of affairs, but I can get into those rather negative corners of our psyche and relate to them quite strongly."
As far as he's come from his many paranoid preoccupations of the 1970s, he doesn't sound overly optimistic.
"Unfortunately, there has been in the air for a number of years this really rather awesome feeling that we are approaching some kind of war situation again. I think any fool could have realised that the type of thing that happened at the World Trade Centre was gonna happen at some point."
Funny how this kind of talk renders even superstar privilege redundant. As he shakes his immaculately dyed mop, there's a tiny glimpse of what Bowie meant when he recently described "misery" as his "default position". But it's a condition he manages to hide behind an exceptionally affable exterior.
"Yes, and I think I hide it better and better," he says with a laugh. "I don't actually feel that I have that default position quite as strongly as I had in the past. I used to vacillate quite strongly between being very depressed and being happy, euphoric."
There may be no performer on Earth with such a catalogue of flagrant fashion crimes. From the feather boas and sequinned sheaths of the glam era to the archetypal 80s mullet, could Mr Bowie put his finger on his most Spinal Tap moment?
"Oh God! I thought [the 1986 movie] Labyrinth got pretty damn near it, but I was made to do that. What ones did I do of my own volition? That's more telling, isn't it? I've always hated the way I looked when I was with the King Bees [in 1965]. Yeah, it was that coalman's jacket I used to wear, the leather kinda waistcoaty affair. It was very long and it had no sleeves. It was what coalmen used to wear to put their sacks over their backs but I thought it was an interesting fashion item! My hair was none too clever either," he chuckles.
David Bowie doesn't look like he has many bad hair days anymore. "I eat well and I have a little exercise regime I do each day," he shrugs. He's been drug and alcohol-free these past 14 years. Like many reformed hedonists of his generation, coffee is his sole remaining vice.
He brews his first cup at 5am, when he logs onto www.davidbowie.com to check what his beloved cyber "community" has said about him during the night.
The level of his involvement is astonishing. He has personally programmed three streaming radio stations, he diarises regularly, updates recommended reading and web links and participates in promotions, discussions and feedback.
Bowie's tone is jovial, generous and, yes, fatherly. Far from the icy enigma of Ziggy Stardust, here's a pop icon who seems to genuinely love hanging with his homies.
"Oh yeah, I do," he says. "And I also get angry with them and wanna tick 'em off sometimes. I'm forever correcting 'em: 'No I didn't! That was Ozzy Osbourne, not me!' Someone once told me, 'David, don't explain, don't complain.' But I've never taken that to heart. I always wanna say, 'You got that wrong!'"
So what does he count as his most valuable contribution to rock'n'roll?
"I would like to think I opened up a lot of avenues for people to explore," he says with measured modesty. "More than anything else I like the idea that what I did was a liberalising experience in a way and took music away from a kind of claustrophobia and narrow-mindedness. It certainly opened it up a bit."
Fittingly, it also made him filthy rich. His Bowie Bonds initiative reportedly netted US$55million five years ago. But ask him how unfathomable wealth changes a man's life and you'll get a roar of laughter for an answer.
"Ask Paul McCartney mate, not me! Mine's imagined wealth, from what I've read. On a day to day basis, it really doesn't mean much: we don't have a life that entails that kind of financially-driven lifestyle. I mean: we eat in, we have a child to look after...
I don't understand all that stuff that people who live in Hollywood and London have to go through. We don't get any of that where we live."[/size]

Wahrscheinlich weiß sie selber nicht, was drin steht, sonst hätte sie es in den Betreff geschrieben.  :wink:

Uuuuh - soviel - Englisch - dweny - gibt's da auch - ne Kurzfassung von - oder - muss ich - das jetzt alles - lesen -
Cheers,

Uuuuh - soviel - Englisch - dweny - gibt's da auch - ne Kurzfassung von

Meine Alben sind nicht notwendigerweise die gl�cklichsten Alben in der Welt gewesen. Ich denke kann zwei dort sein, oder drei von ihnen, die Sie genommen haben konnten, waren sie notiert worden kurz vor 9/11, konnten Sie gesagt haben, ' Ooh, Wimmern!' Aber Nr., es nicht [ h�ngt mit ] zusammen, das. Es ist dort ist eine bestimmte Art angst gerade, das in meiner Arbeit enthalten wird. Ich denke mich bin sehr gut an der unspezifischen nagging