On the floor rests a diamond. It may be plastic. Then indistinct images are reflected on displaced glass lying on a picture frame. Then words appear on the screen, smudged typewritten words. Where are we now?, they say.
We might well ask. It was 5am on Tuesday January 8, 2013, and David Bowie was back.
Some trick, that: a reappearance without a disappearance.
So strange is our attitude to artists that we think they are gone when they are merely quiet. Yes, things had changed since his heart attack in 2004. But Bowie had done things in public pretty much every year since.
In September 2005, he sang Life on Mars? at the fundraising event Fashion Rocks. It was a compelling performance; he was made up to look like he had just got up from his hospital bed and donned his suit. He sang two songs with the then-hip Arcade Fire, whom he adored. That year, he was interviewed by Courtney Pine for his BBC Radio 2 show Jazz Crusade.
In March 2006, filming began on the The Prestige. It was directed by Christopher Nolan and was about feuding Victorian magicians; Bowie played the visionary engineer Nikola Tesla. May 2006, he sang Arnold Layne and Comfortably Numb alongside David Gilmour at the Royal Albert Hall. In June 2006, he recorded his appearance in the Ricky Gervais sitcom Extras; it was broadcast three months later and included what may well qualify as a new Bowie song. In October 2006, he voiced Lord Royal Highness in the Spongebob Squarepants film. In November 2006, he sang Wild is the Wind, Fantastic Voyage and Changes at the Black Ball charity gala in New York; it would be his final concert performance. That year, he also appeared in a very short film/long advertisement about record stores, directed by Wim Wenders (opening line: “I’ve made a journey out of my life; I’ve been trying to find what is the essence of it”).
In March 2008, he filmed a cameo appearance for the film Bandslam (the plot had him discovering a new act on MySpace). In June 2008, he chose songs and wrote some revealing notes for a new compilation called iSelect; it came free with, of all things, the Mail on Sunday, exposing its millions of readers, not typically known for their sense of artistic adventure, to the likes of Repetition and Some Are.
Only then is there something closer to radio silence, but he would still pop up here and there, such as at the CFDA Fashion Awards in 2010. He had told the Observer what he had been listening to on his iPod; tracks included For with God no thing shall be impossible by John Adams (Bowie: “The emotional in search of the divine”). And that year, unknown to the world, he would begin making tentative steps towards, yes, a new album. There had long been privacy; now, there was secrecy.
If David Bowie sings no songs, does David Bowie exist?
The point of David Bowie was to provide cover for David Jones. Bowie was the public face; Jones was the man behind it. The name was chosen initially to differentiate the r’n’b-loving Mod from the Monkee, but Bowie became something else. “I fell in love with David Jones,” said Iman.
For a recluse, he - whoever this was - had been pretty chatty. But there was a growing sense that Bowie had sung his last. And two odd things started happening to him (specifically, the him of the public’s imagination). First, there were strong rumours among well-placed figures in the music industry and the media that he was gravely ill. The Flaming Lips recorded a song called Is David Bowie Dying?; it ends with the repeated line “Take your legs and run into the death-rays of the sun,” evoking Heathen (The Rays), which in turn evokes Im Abendrot, typically sequenced as the last of Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs.
The other odd thing was that he was somehow becoming Bowier. His time away from the stage and the cameras had restored to him a cloak of enigma, and it fitted well. In the late 1990s, he had pioneered a strategy of demystification that other artists would soon follow. But by the early 2010s, Bowie once again carried a sense of quietly beguiling mystery and unquestionable artistic credibility. This was demonstrated to spectacular effect at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics: the proceedings were directed by Bowie devotee Danny Boyle, who had the British team enter the arena to a particularly immense-sounding “Heroes” (the juxtaposition of the impeccably Apollonian Chris Hoy with an anthem so fundamentally Dionysian gave added emphasis to those quote marks). Writing in the Guardian, Robin Turner said it “resonated like a national anthem beamed from an alternate universe”.
The organisers asked Bowie to perform; of course they did. He turned them down; of course he did.
David Bowie was long gone.
The return of David Bowie was small and monumental. It relied on technology that had not existed even a decade earlier: swift video streaming to publish the work unannounced, and social media to spread the word. It was picked up that morning by Today, BBC radio’s flagship current affairs programme (this was apparently by the marketers’ design). It appeared in news bulletins around the world throughout the day, which happened to be Bowie’s 66th birthday. British newspapers on Wednesday January 9 were packed with response, analysis and photos. A little drop had generated a tsunami.
But in order not to be overwhelmed by the simple fact of Bowie’s return, the song itself had to be strong. It was helpful therefore that Where Are We Now? was as good as anything he had written for decades. It helped too that Bowie seemed to be embracing ageing: he sounded markedly older, his voice brittle in places; it was the sound of a man looking back and wondering what had happened. In composition and execution, it was rich, elegant, graceful and affecting; there was no attempt to sound young or to fit in with current trends.
But there is something else going on with Where Are We Now?, a certain magical quality; and here we are at last returned to the story of Bowie and spirituality.
Remember “Heroes”. Remember its setting in Berlin and the centrality of the Wall to its sense of transfiguration and transcendence. Remember how it mentions no god or devil yet makes a profoundly metaphysical claim, one that is also at the heart of Christianity: that love is stronger than death. Remember its kinship with the work of the theologian Paul Tillich, who wrote of “the courage to be”.
Remember something else. It is tempting in the first instance to assume that the ‘I’ and ‘me’ in any Bowie song refers to Bowie. This tendency is natural and often justifiable. But other possibilities should always be held in mind. Notwithstanding Bowie-ish ideas like the mutability of the self and the dangers of drawing too clear a distinction between artist and subject, we can say for instance that the “I” in “Heroes” is not Bowie, but Bowie writing about someone else in the first person.
Here are the opening lines of Where Are We Now?:
Had to get the train
From Potsdamer Platz
You never knew that
That I could do that
Just walking the dead
Sitting in the Dschungel
On Nürnberger Strasse
A man lost in time
Near KaDeWe
Just walking the dead
Remembrances of Berlin past. The winding chords map out the streets; the melody ambles along them, and is sometimes reflective and sometimes surprised.
The second verse goes:
20,000 people
Cross Bösebrücke
Fingers are crossed
Just in case
Walking the dead
This is a direct historical reference, hitherto rare for Bowie. It recounts events from 1989, as the border between East Berlin and West Berlin was opened, as the Wall fell.
Then it builds into something deeply moving and stirring, made all the more so by its being so delicate and humble. The chords find a new stability; they are resolute, assured. From these firm foundations emerges a guitar part of beautiful simplicity, vulnerable and defiant; courageous. There is a gathering of strength from the drums.
As long as there's sun
As long as there's sun
As long as there's rain
As long as there's rain
As long as there's fire
As long as there's fire
As long as there's me
As long as there's you
The sentence is completed not by words but by music, music of wondrous power and grace. The effect is sublime.
In the video, the song is sung by the particularly craggy face of Bowie projected onto a curious two-headed puppet; on the other head is projected the face of a woman. Later, a man stands at a distance from them, looking at them. The man is David Bowie.
The video has images of Bowie’s old address in Berlin, apparently filmed by himself when he lived there. But maybe this couple have spoken to us before.
I will be king and you will be queen. Me and you, just being. All else falls away.
The moment you know
You know
You know
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Next on Bowie/God:
The Next Day and the art of desecration
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