No footprints in the sand
David Bowie cries out. But all he hears back is his own echo
David Bowie performing at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2002
Something was bound to happen, because David Bowie was in the mountains.
There were the mountains of Lhasa. There was the mountain called Freecloud. There was the land of the supergods, where mountain magic heavy hung. There was the mountain of It Ain’t Easy. There were the mountains on mountains in Station to Station. There was the mountain that manifested incomprehensible forces. Strong in Bowie lore is the spiritual power of mountains.
And mountains are where mankind often meets God in the Bible. There is Mount Sinai, where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments. There is Mount Carmel, where the power of God was shown in the defeat of the prophets of Baal. There is the Mount of Olives, where Jesus often taught his disciples, and from where Jesus ascended into heaven; and there is the mountain where Jesus preached his sermon; and there is the mountain upon which Jesus was transfigured. The air is thin up there.
Strange things were happening to Bowie in the mountains. And then, one day, he saw Manhattan burning.
The light of the new millennium had been kind to him. He did only one thing of note in 2000 but it would resound for decades. He headlined the final night of the Glastonbury festival, and it was a triumph. This Bowie was a new creation; it had made some faltering steps for a couple of years but had now reached a kind of summit. This Bowie was as comfortable with crowdpleasers as it was with obscurities. There was no shame in conducting a singalong, no embarrassment in giving people what they wanted. This is for them, not us, he had told his band, and the response from the 250,000 in attendance was duly ecstatic.
The performance seemed to engender a fresh affection towards him: his body of work, presented in this way, with power and warmth and vulnerability, was unanswerable. There was perhaps a relief in some quarters that this had not been a three-hour drum and bass set or a reunion of Tin Machine, but anyone who had been paying attention for the past couple of years would have detected that something had changed. That the show still had room for Hallo Spaceboy and Little Wonder, and finished with a bruising I’m Afraid of Americans, was testament to his mastery. At last, everything fitted together; at last, there was a sense of completion. The alienatingly abrasive shows of 1995 felt a lifetime ago. After antithesis, synthesis.
Then it was straight to the studio to reclaim an even deeper past. With his Glastonbury band and assorted guest musicians, he rerecorded some of his ‘60s songs, all of which were unknown beyond his more devoted fans. To these, he added a couple of new compositions; he said these were written in his more youthful style. But any hopes that Glastonbury had restored his commercial appeal were soon squashed: his record label at the time refused to release the album. It was called Toy, and would remain officially unavailable for 20 years.
Yet something else happened that summer, too, something occupying a different dimension of significance. Bowie and Iman welcomed into the world their daughter, Alexandria Zahra Jones. “My soul feels complete,” Iman told Hello! magazine. “Well, I can't better that,” added Bowie. “That seems about perfect really. It is amazing how a new child can refocus one's direction seconds after its birth. Everything falls into a feeling of 'rightness'.”
He had hoped the songs would change. And then they changed.
There was a figure from the past who entered Bowie’s life again in 1998. He was Tony Visconti; he had produced some of Bowie’s finest work, including Low, “Heroes” and Scary Monsters. The two had not worked together since 1982. They reconvened to record a cover of Mother by John Lennon and a song for, of all things, The Rugrats Movie. They talked about doing a whole album together, but Bowie was unsure, at least in part because he was evidently unconvinced by the songs he was writing at the time:
“I really didn’t want to tarnish the work that we’d done before, because it was so good and people have such a great feeling about the work that we’ve done before. So it was really waiting until I found songs that were the right weight for the two of us to do together, that didn’t require engineering the past or mining it for particular kinds of sounds.”
He noticed something shift in January 2001. “I started writing a weight of song that I really felt happy with. And I thought this is the kind of thing I could do with Tony.”
Then came more emotional upheaval. News emerged in April that Bowie’s mother, Peggy Burns, had died, aged 88. His friend Freddie Burretti, who had helped craft the image of Ziggy Stardust, died the following month, aged 49.
Bowie found himself wanting to write “narrative, crafted” songs, and to create what he called a “personal, cultural restoration”. On the recommendation of one of his guitarists, he investigated a recording studio that was quite different from any he in which he had worked before, up in the Catskill Mountains, about 120 miles north of New York City. The place affected him deeply, as he told Interview magazine:
“It was almost an epiphany I had. Walking through the door, everything that my album should be about was galvanised for me into one focal point. Even though I couldn’t express it in words that second, I knew what the lyrics were already. They were all suddenly accumulated in my mind. It was an on-the-road-to-Damascus type of experience, you know? It was almost like my feet were lifted off the ground.”
He was on Mount Tonche, about 2,000 feet above sea level; the surroundings were stark, and there were wild pigs and deer and bears. “This is not cute, on top of this mountain,” he said. “I don’t know what happened up there, but something clicked for me as a writer.”
There was a renewed sense of ambition, a fresh conviction; there were many newcomers to his band. This was to be bold, big, meaningful; it would carry weight. It would inaugurate a new phase of Bowie’s career, but it would also reach back, well before his own work, before even his own life.
It would be reductive to locate Bowie in any particular intellectual milieu or philosophical school. It may also be a touch preposterous: after all, the man was a pop singer. But there is a particular and place and time with which Bowie’s thought seems to have a special affinity: Germany, in the 19th century, as part of the movement known as German Romanticism.
The nature of reality, the purpose of art, the existence or otherwise of God: philosophers, writers and composers had always grappled with such matters, but now there was a special urgency. Advances in certain kinds of knowledge could not be ignored: what might it mean if the human were merely another species of animal? What if truth were not the preserve of white Europeans; what if peoples elsewhere in the world have insights we lack? What exactly is the point of all this music we are making?
The topic is obviously vast, but within it are certain figures and ideas that are worth examining in relation to Bowie’s work. There are apparently tangential but nonetheless seminal thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer, an uncompromising atheist who questioned whether existence has any meaning, who saw much human activity as essentially worthless, who believed humans were desperately limited in their ability to comprehend reality; he revered Hinduism and Buddhism for their emphasis on quietening the will and acknowledging the futility of mankind’s striving. Schopenhauer accorded a special place to music, which to him was unique among the forms of art: it could express the nature of the world with a profound purity, unmediated by words or images.
Then there are those whose influence is more explicit but not typically acknowledged. Here we might consider the composer Richard Wagner. He was a devotee of Schopenhauer, to the extent of planning an opera extolling Buddhism, while also being shaped at young age by Christianity. But more significantly still, he possessed a breathtaking sense of artistic ambition. He had grown weary of the state of opera in the mid-19th century, and set about revolutionising it, creating what he called ‘music dramas’ that eschewed classical conventions; Bowie would speak in similar terms as he set about remaking pop music in the latter part of the 1970s. Wagner is also credited with pioneering the Gesamtkunstwerk, the ‘total work of art’, which draws from diverse artforms such as music, poetry and visual art to create an all-encompassing, overwhelming experience; Bowie’s experiments in multimedia performance followed the same principle. Two of Wagner’s works appear in Bowie’s lyrics: The Flying Dutchman and Das Rheingold. (Bowie loathed Wagner’s Bridal Chorus, mind.)
Wagner was an object of infatuation for Friedrich Nietzsche; and now we find ourselves on familiar territory. Two of Nietzsche’s ideas had a major effect on Bowie: the Übermensch and the Death of God. They are related, and we will let Bowie discuss the latter in due course. But the former seemed to hold a power over Bowie in the early 1970s especially: the idea in effect of a new race of humans wedded not to the ‘otherworldliness’ of religious belief but to this world, necessitating an entirely new kind of morality devoid of mercy and pity, out of which would grow a human possessing total mastery. Bowie’s understanding of all this appears somewhat faltering, but the idea cropped up explicitly in The Supermen, Quicksand (‘Superman’ being a rather unsatisfactory translation of the German) and Oh! You Pretty Things.
As Bowie put it in 1976: “I always had a repulsive sort of need to be something more than human. I felt very very puny as a human. I thought. ‘Fuck that. I want to be a Superman.’”
There are other, perhaps less sinister, similarities in thought between the two. Nietzsche defined heroism as follows: “To face at the same time your greatest suffering and your greatest hope.” It is a fine description of the act of the lovers in “Heroes”. Nietzsche also expressed disdain for those who fail to “consider the demand for certainty their innermost desire and profoundest need”: Bowie ended Earthling by repeating “I don’t want knowledge, I want certainty,” itself a misquotation of a British philosopher, Bertrand Russell.
And Nietzsche in turn was an inspiration for Richard Strauss. The Übermensch is posited by Nietzsche in his book Also sprach Zarathustra; Strauss expressed the novel wordlessly through a piece of music sharing its name. This ‘tone poem’ - a controversial artform at the time, and a term also used to describe some of Bowie’s predominantly instrumental works on Low and “Heroes” - was used cinematically, and genuinely iconically, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film that left a lasting impression on Bowie. Some of the more bombastic orchestrations on Bowie’s songs appear to echo the booming timpani of Also sprach Zarathustra; the piano on his cover of See Emily Play seems at one point to quote its melody.
And as Bowie aged, his affinity with Strauss deepened. In the mountains, he listened earnestly and recurrently to what have become known as Strauss’s Four Last Songs; he spoke of wanting to emulate the composer’s creative longevity, keeping on “like Strauss at 84”.
Romanticism, then, gave to Bowie much of the material that formed him. He said in 1999: “I’m at heart a Romantic - not terribly modern at all. My sensibility is probably much nearer to a late 19th century artist than it is to a 20th century artist.”
And there is a painting that has become an emblem of German Romanticism. It was painted in 1818 by Caspar David Friedrich and is called Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Here it is:
“I had personally really quite high expectations about the future. I had no idea it would sort of capitulate into this awful mess.” So said Bowie in 2002.
He had nearly finished recording what would be his next album when horror unfolded in the city he had made his home. So clear was the air in the Catskills that he could see with the aid of binoculars the embers of the World Trade Center.
“And I look at my daughter and sometimes the first few days after 9/11 I looked at her and couldn’t feel happy. Which is a terrible thing to feel. I looked at her and just felt fearful.”
The album, when it arrived in the June of 2002, was called Heathen.
“Heathen felt right inasmuch as it was about the unilluminated mind,” he explained. “It was an idea, a feeling a sense of what 21st century man might become if he’s not already. Somebody who’s lowered his standards, spiritually, intellectually, morally, whatever. There’s a kind of a - someone who’s not even bothered searching for a spiritual life any more, and is completely existing on a materialistic plane.”
Before you heard the album, you felt it. The look and feel of the thing was superior in every way to any record of his since 1980. There was an unnerving presence to it.
The imagery was portentous, sometimes eerily serene, sometimes searingly violent. Bowie cut a vaguely chilling figure in his vintage suit, while classical works of art were slashed, defaced, desecrated.
“I wanted to illustrate the subtext the word Heathen being barbarian or philistine,” said Bowie, “and an unacceptance of culture or high culture, a wish to destroy everything that we have created to express ourselves.”
Remove the booklet containing lyrics struck through and obscured and you are presented with early editions of three weighty books: The General Theory of Relativity by Albert Einstein; The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud; and Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, here translated as The Gay Science, by Friedrich Nietzsche.
Bowie explained his choices:
“I used those three people as being representative of the triad of ideas that destroyed all our absolutes in the beginning of the 20th century. From the late half of the 19th century, the accumulation of material of scientific progress caused people to believe that they had more control over their lives and their environment, and then it was something of a catastrophe at the time when Nietzsche suggested God was dead. And then around the same time, and later, Einstein changed our concept of time and space, and Freud changed the idea of how we felt inside. So by the time we were into the 20th century, everything that we knew was wrong. It was a brand new understanding that we in fact were there to fill the void that was taken by God. And filling that void, the only thing we were able to do was create the bomb. That was our greatest piece of creativity in the role of God.
“This was the culmination of all our knowledge, was to create something which was utterly, thoroughly destructive. And I think that act threw us into chaos, and I don’t thing we’ve ever recovered. I think we’ve lost our ability to connect with any kind of spiritual life, and I think we’ve lost a sense of purpose, and we’re not absolutely convinced that there’s some kind of plan.”
It is worth at this point revisiting The Madman, the parable in which the death of God is proclaimed, for it is proclaimed with a blend of exhilaration and terror. It is recited here by the theologian Peter Rollins:
The packaging acted rather like the title sequence of a film. And then the music came. Immediately there was a sonic depth that had long been absent (welcome back, Tony Visconti). Then Bowie’s first two words:
Nothing remains
The phrase evokes the poem Ozymandias, by the English Romantic Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of the great reflections on the hubris of mankind.
The song is called Sunday; the word does not appear in the lyrics, so its significance is for the listener to discern. It is ambitious, not merely in terms of structure and music, but in what it is trying to do, where it is trying to reach. It depicts a landscape that is barren and hostile, but colours and shapes come forth gradually, from the music as much as anywhere; then an explosion, as if we had been listening to a fuse, and then a fade into nothingness.
One section of the song has voices chanting in a quasi-Gregorian style:
In your fear, seek only peace
In your fear, seek only love
This brings to mind On Love, by the mystic poet Khalil Gibran, who was named in a song by Bowie some 32 years earlier:
But if in your fear you would seek only
love’s peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover
your nakedness and pass out of love’s
threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you
shall laugh, but not all of your laughter,
and weep, but not all of your tears.
Bowie, stentorian, sings over them in monotone:
Rise together
Through these clouds
As on wings
Evoking this, from On Love:
When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him
Bowie’s last words in the song are:
All my trials, Lord
Will be remembered
Everything has changed
Quite a statement, all in all.
It is fair to say however that the album is not all like this. There are 12 songs on Heathen; only maybe four of them have quite this weight, although a fifth is deceptively lightweight. But the songs in question are just about as significant in a spiritual sense as any this series has examined so far. The next is actually heartbreaking.
He said it was “an entreaty to the highest being to show himself in a way that could be understood”; he said it was “too disturbing”. It is called I Would Be Your Slave.
“God plays a very important part in my life. I look to him a lot and he is the cornerstone of my existence - even more as I get older,” he had said in 1992. At his wedding, his best friend from childhood had read the words: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills; from whence cometh my help? My help cometh from the Lord.”
Now, Bowie sang:
Do you sleep in quietude?
Do you walk in peace?
Do you laugh out loud at me?
“Just as long as I can walk, I’ll walk beside you,” he sang to his God in 1976; he sang it again in 1999. “Just as long as I can see, I’ll never stop this vision flowing.”
Now, he sang:
I don't see the point at all
No footprints in the sand
There is an allegorical Christian poem called Footprints. It ends with God whispering:
“My precious child, I love you and will never leave you
Never, ever, during your trials and testings.
When you saw only one set of footprints,
It was then that I carried you.”
But Bowie repeats:
I don't give a damn
I don't see the point at all
No footprints in the sand
This is sung loudly, rebukingly, beratingly. The instrumental backing is strange: there is the repeated sound of breathing, but it is mechanical, and its rhythms are not those of the song; the music is played by a string quartet, but for the most part it is hesitant, making apparently confident beginnings before turning back on itself, allowing moments of stability, rising into hope, before returning to uncertainty and doubt and despair. A man trying, believing, reaching, failing, and again, and again.
As Bowie put it in an interview with John Wilson for Radio 4:
“I’m a very spiritual person inasmuch as I’ve had this awful bloody journey searching for a spiritual life that makes some kind of - that firstly actually meets my expectations of what a spiritual life should be, and what kind of part it should play in my life. Maybe I asked too much. But I keep coming to a dead end, but as I get older my questions are fewer. But I ask them - I bark them more than ask them, actually.”
There are hints of the Psalms here, perhaps particularly Psalm 13:
How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I bear pain in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
Consider and answer me, O Lord my God!
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death,
The psalm ends:
But I trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord
because he has dealt bountifully with me
And Bowie opens a way back for God. Only it’s on Bowie’s terms:
Open up your heart to me
Show me who you are
And I would be your slave
There is no other Bowie song quite like this, in style or content. There are others that it echoes, and one can imagine a timeline where this is the sort of thing he did more of, but I Would Be Your Slave stands alone. As perhaps it should.
One of the angels was perfect. She was the exception.
Early on, there was the angel with the grubby face. Some time later, there was the angel who coughed, who shook his crumpled wings, whom no one noticed, who just leafed through a magazine, who yawned as he rubbed the sleep away. In another 20 years there were the despairing angels, the scapegoats, the silent admin officers. Amid all these was an angel like the ones in the paintings:
These are silver wings
These are golden eyes
These are floating clouds
Angel for life
This angel was Iman, David Bowie’s wife, in a song he had written for her shortly after their wedding. But the shabbier, more deshevilled, altogether more human angels were still lumbering around Bowie’s imagination in the 21st century.
They appear and disappear on Heathen in 5:15 The Angels Have Gone. These are gangly, ungainly things, “all legs and wings,” with “strange sandy eyes”. And they are either departed or invisible.
“A man who could once see his angels — hopes and aspirations, maybe? — can’t see them anymore,” Bowie said of the song. “And he blames the crushing dumbness of life for it.”
There is a lot going on and it is hard to see any of it clearly. In the chorus, he bellows with a kind of fury:
We never talk anymore
Forever I will adore only you
5:15 is also the name of a song by The Who, whose guitarist and main songwriter Pete Townshend plays on another Heathen track. Bowie said it was the time of the first train out of London in the sixties after the clubs closed. The narrator of the song is left waiting in the rain at a cold and desolate station.
Angels vanish from a painting in the film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. It is a fearful moment. Bowie acts in the film, which recounts the last days of the troubled and traumatised Laura Palmer.
Her best friend asks her: “Do you think that if you were falling in space, that you would slow down after a while, or go faster and faster?”
Laura replies: “Faster and faster. And for a long time you wouldn't feel anything. And then you'd burst into fire. Forever. And the angels wouldn't help you. Because they've all gone away.”
The song has celestial synths and heavenly voices, wrenched and rent by merciless, clattering drums and a piano dancing in the chaos. There is a chugging shuffle recalling the locomotive sounds from Station to Station.
It all sounds blue-black, like a bruise.
Somehow, at the end of it all, there is a kind of peace.
“They’re naive declarations - ‘if you’re not going to do anything about our world, you’re not going to have any support for your plans in the future, God!’,” Bowie said of the album’s more confrontational lyrics. “That kind of bald-faced idiot statement. But it’s the frustrations of day-to-day life.”
Declarations don’t come much more naive, nor statements more idiot, than those on the penultimate track of Heathen. The song is called A Better Future, and it is one of the less prepossessing songs he recorded this century. It is musically and sonically irksome, a sketch of a nursery rhyme encased in all manner of clutter and detritus. He somehow spins it out for four minutes and eleven seconds, which is longer than Life on Mars?.
The lyrics are plain, Bowie once again setting out his demands to his deity:
Please don't tear this world asunder
Please take back this fear we're under
I demand a better future
Or I might just stop wanting you
I might just stop wanting you
Please make sure we get tomorrow
All this pain, all this sorrow
I demand a better future
Or I might just stop needing you
I might just stop needing you
Give my children sunny smiles
Give them warm and cloudless skies
I demand a better future
Or I might just stop loving you
Loving you, loving you
There is perhaps something to be said for the guilelessness of the thing. It is as if Bowie can no longer be bothered with the poetic and the abstract. He’s tried everything. He might as well just spit it out.
The last of Strauss’s Last Four Songs is called Im Abendrot. There is no consistent rendering of the title into English. The great critic William Mann, whose translation is printed with the Deutsche Grammophon recording, has it as At Gloaming. Literally, abendrot means ‘evening red’; you could call it At Sunset (as Wikipedia does), but that feels insufficiently specific. Nothing in English is quite equivalent, but we know it when we see it: that time when the sun is vanishing and its light is dying over the unforgiving horizon.
The last song on the album is called Heathen (The Rays). There are eerie guitar chimes and faintly oppressive synths, and then Bowie sings:
Steel on the skyline
Sky made of glass
Made for a real world
All things must pass
There is something here again of Ozymandias. (Bowie maintained that the words were written before the attack on the World Trade Center.)
Waiting for something
Looking for someone
Is there no reason?
Have I stared too long?
A quest for treasure that must evade the quester.
Then quite devastatingly, an almost infant howl:
You say you'll leave me
Then, over a weird squall of synths and guitars, over drums that sound like a sinister false smile, over chords that seem to be heading towards an epiphany but soon stumble - then, the last words:
And when the sun is low
And the rays high
I can see it now
I can feel it die
Wordless cries:
Ohh-oh-oh
Ohh-oh-oh
Watching Bowie’s performances of this song can feel like intruding on private grief; he sometimes seems in genuine torment.
“The idea of fear is very strong within the album,” Bowie told John Wilson. “I think one of the major fears that underlines it all for me personally is the fear that there is no spiritual life.”
Bowie said this, in conversation with George Stroumboulopoulos of Much Music: “Are they structures we create to give ourselves a reason for living? Is the reality that there is no morality? Which is kind of scary, because that means there’s no reason for life, in which case why do we bother? I hate that. I don’t want to go there. But you do. You keep confronting that all the time. I do anyway. We all feel very alone, don’t we, often.”
But maybe there was a kind of hope, somewhere, on the other side. He told French TV:
“There’s quasi new religions, but there is no direct sense of what our purpose is any more. Now that may be a good thing, because it may show itself to be that we don’t have a purpose. Are we big enough and mature enough to exist like that? Are we mature enough to accept that there’s no plan, there’s no going somewhere, there’s no gift of immortality at the end of this - if we evolve far enough we may never have to die! I mean, that seems to be the reach from the past. Or maybe we can’t live like that. Maybe we have to exist and live on the idea that we have one day at a time. Can we do that? Because if we could do that, we may be serving some really great thing.”
After all that, Heathen may be a failure.
All the talk before its release suggested it was meant as a definitive statement, Bowie drawing on all he had learnt, writing all but the covers all by himself for the first time in nearly a decade, and now back in the studio with Visconti, making a record that means something. Yet much of Heathen is not as imperious as it might be: the tone over the course of the album is sometimes uncertain, and it is a little lumpy in places. Townshend was surprised at its ‘homemade’ feel: “You can see the joins.” It is customary for professional musicians to modify the sounds of synths, to tailor them to their needs; but Bowie used many ‘preset’ sounds, the basic settings anyone can use. That visionary 1930s philosopher-scientist on the cover? He pops in, but only now and then.
Yet maybe that is ultimately all for the good. It is a four-stars-out-of-five album, and it is seeking that missing star, and it cannot quite find it. It falls short, and you can feel it fall short, and so the quest must continue.
That missing star would one day be found. It turned out that Bowie was just in the foothills; for there in the distance loomed, yes, another mountain.
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Next on Bowie/God:
Reality, unreality and evaporation
Glad to see Heathen got the treatment it deserves! It's a beautiful record and easily one of his most moving.