GQ Editor,
dylanjonesgq
Dylan Jones,
picks Bowie's best classics and deep cuts for your memorial playlist.
Featuring covers, theme songs and leaked surprises for even the most hard-nosed Bowie fan
Happy
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Birthday
@dylanjonesgq
Absolute Legend
find your inner
Thomas Jerome Newton
and celebrate
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JANUARY 2015 GINTUMEII'S QUASTSSLY Editor DYLAN JONES PA TO THE EDITOR & EVENTS CO-ORDINATOR
Dylan Jones, OBE
Condé Nast Director. GREAT Ambassador for the U.K. Hay Foundation Chair. British Fashion Council Chair (Men’s). GQ.co.uk
Art Decade
This is one of the many Brian Eno-influenced songs on David Bowie’s extraordinary 1977 album Low, when he was in his pomp.
Pretty Pink Rose by Adrian Belew
This 1990 single written and recorded with Adrian Belew is a frustrating indicator of what Tin Machine could have sounded like had Bowie actually been more proscriptive. The song is not terribly good, but the attitude and the swing are tremendous and it sounds like a genuine generic rock song. In a good way. It was released under Belew’s name, and so never had the exposure it ought to have had, and yet at the time was probably Bowie’s best single since “Absolute Beginners”, four years previously. Belew, Adrian was one of the people I interviewed for A Life, and he was fascinating in his observations about Bowie.
The London Boys
Having struggled for a decade to make it in an industry that he often thought was collectively conspiring against him, little was left to chance and the ruthlessness with which he assaulted his audience when he finally did become successful was only matched by the extraordinary quality of the material, and the stagecraft, that he used as ammunition. Whereas in the Sixties Bowie was always slightly behind the curve, as the Seventies clicked in, he inched ahead of it, peering at the future through a viewfinder. “The London Boys” was one of the few outstanding songs he recorded in the Sixties; much of that early material is now being reconsidered, but this has always been a classic.
Can You Hear Me
When Elvis Presley died in August 1977, Bowie briefly considered recording a tribute album, arranging classic Elvis songs for Iggy Pop to sing. He had been a fan all his life. Bowie’s first performance, aged eleven, was an Elvis impersonation for an audience of boy scouts in Bromley. Years later, he would paint Elvis’s TCB (“Takin’ Care Of Business”) lightning bolt logo onto his face on the cover of Aladdin Sane. His Ziggy Stardust concerts usually closed with the melodramatic “Rock’n’Roll Suicide”, which Bowie sang wearing an Elvis-style jumpsuit – copied by Bowie’s designer friend Freddie Burretti from one of the King’s – before departing the stage. This was immediately followed by the announcement, “David Bowie has left the building.”
In 1976, Bowie had even tried to get Elvis to record “Golden Years”, only to have it turned down. It was easy enough to get the demo to Elvis as they shared a record label, RCA, and bizarrely Parker thought it might be a good idea for the two stars to collaborate. It’s simple to see why Bowie pitched the song to Elvis. If you listen to his mid-Seventies house band, it’s remarkably easy to imagine them working with one of Bowie’s classic Philly-soul records. They would have given it lots of hi-hat, wah-wah guitar and piping horns, employing the kind of Vegas swing that would have allowed Elvis to glide over the top, singing “Come get up my baby… Come b-b-b-baby” with all the baritone playfulness he could muster, just like he did on “Teddy Bear” all those years ago. Bowie was so keen for Elvis to record the song he even sang a little like him on the verses, pitching his voice as close to the King’s as he could (“channeling the spirit”).
Rebel Rebel
Here is a song that to the uninitiated might sound like it was made by the Rolling Stones. This is unsurprising as it was designed to sound exactly like one. Bowie was the most competitive pop star of them all and he was especially competitive with Mick Jagger. “There was always an exchange of information within our friendship,” said Jagger, after he died. “And I suppose there was always an element of competition between us, but it never felt overwhelming. When he would see me, he’d give me a hug and I could feel him going up behind the collar of my shirt to see what I was wearing. He used to copy me sometimes, but he’d be very honest about it. If he took one of your moves, he’d say, ‘That’s one of yours – I just tried it.’ I didn’t mind sharing things with him, because he would share so much with me – it was a two-way street.”
Drive In Saturday
For me and members of my generation, the Bowie generation, his death was more momentous than John Lennon’s. Of course it would be invidious to compare the two, but it is still difficult even now for me to grasp just how much he meant to me. I was a teenager when he emerged and was one of the many people who saw his performance of “Starman” on Top Of The Pops in the summer of 1972 (I had just turned 12), one of the many millions whose lives were altered at such an impressionable age. This is one of my favourite Bowie songs, from 1973, not least because it is so descriptive while at the same time being genuinely odd, in terms of its subject matter and its arrangement.
Ziggy Stardust by Bauhaus
The first time I met Bowie, he asked me for a light for his Marlboro.
Life On Mars?
The legendary pianist Rick Wakeman played the piano on this song, which appeared on Hunky Dory in 1972, and this is what he has to say about it in my book David Bowie: A Life:
Absolute Beginners
This is one of Bowie’s greatest love songs and actually one of his best ever songs. It’s easy to forget how unfashionable Bowie was for a while – I remember when I worked at The Face and I suggested that this song was as good as “Heroes” I was laughed out of the building. This was how far his stock had fallen... In hindsight, however, it has come to be regarded as one of the best things he ever did.
No Plan
No long after David Bowie passed away, news spread that Blackstar wasn’t the sum total of his final recordings and that there were a few songs that were finished – maybe even a whole album’s worth – that might be released in the future. Conspiracy theorists, tired of creating ever more bizarre accounts of Bowie’s own micromanagement of his own death, started suggesting that the artist had recorded not one, but maybe several album’s worth of songs, records that were scheduled to appear at regular intervals after his death – singing from beyond the grave. Well, three unreleased tracks finally saw the light of day on the Lazarus cast album, three songs written, recorded and produced by Bowie at the same time as Blackstar.
The record contains the cast and band of the original New York production performing their versions of the 18 songs from the show (from “Life On Mars?”, “All The Young Dudes” and “Heroes” through to “Valentine’s Day”, “Love Is Lost” and “Dirty Boys”), Blackstar’s “Lazarus” (which increasingly sounds like something The XX could have had a hand in) as well as the three new Bowie tracks. Co-produced by Bowie and Tony Visconti and recorded with Donny McCaslin and his quartet, the same band that played on Blackstar, these last three songs - “No Plan”, “Killing A Little Time”, “When I Met You” – are predictably intriguing.
Musically rather more orthodox than anything on his final album, lyrically the songs – written to help join narrative threads in the play – at first appear to add an unnerving coda to the soliloquies on Blackstar. On “Killing A Little Time”, a song that sounds as though it wouldn’t be completely out of place on The Man Who Sold The World (with a thrilling Ronsonesque guitar line adding to the industrial fusion and Steely Dan chord changes), he sings “I’ve got a handful of songs to sing, To sting your soul, To fuck you over”; as Bowie was never very good at being didactic (he liked to say he left that to John Lennon), you realise quite quickly that he’s singing as Thomas Jerome Newton, the man who literally fell to Earth. The second song, the boilerplate “When I Met You” is the weakest of the three, sounding a little like something he might have recorded in the mid-Nineties, if he had been trying to deconstruct a Joy Division song, that is.
The third song, “No Plan”, is the standout, a genuine greatest hit that sounds as if it came direct from the Scott Walker songbook, with vaporous traces of Dusty Springfield. A ballad both mournful and uplifting, the version sung by Sophia Anne Caruso actually sounds like a classic show tune, while Bowie’s version is one of the most haunting things he’s ever done. Ever did. It’s a beautiful song, and sounds almost as though it’s covered in a buttery light. The words, too, while seeming to slip easily from Newton’s lips, could quite easily apply to Bowie’s present and perennial disposition: “There’s no music here, I’m lost in streams of sound, Here am I nowhere now? No plan?... All the things that are my life, My moods, My beliefs, My designs, Me Alone, Nothing to regret, This is no place, but here I am, This is not quite yet.” Ouch. It almost sounds apostolic.
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