Pop performers

Press, 20 May 1987, Page 30

Pop performers

At 40, the super-star, David Bowie, is at the top of the tree with films, stage work, and round-the-world tours which mean just that; he is on one now, involving 15 countries, which will last six' months or more. On the way up Bowie admitted bisexuality and heavy drug abuse, and came within a whisker of a complete breakdown. Now, reports the Duo writer, JOHN SMALLWOOD, he is as clean as a whistle. He describes himself as an ageing rocker but he must know that life begins at 40. Fortieth-birthday blues did not hit the super-star, David Bowie. There was not time even to think about age. He was up to his eyes — one green, one blue — in preparations for his first world tour for three years. When Bowie says “world tour” he means just that; none of your quick excursions and “let’s-get-home-before-the-beer-gets-cold” sort of thing. At the first count, his "Glass Spider” tour was scheduled for 60 cities in 15 countries and would last six months. As the days went by the number of concerts began creeping up towards the 100 mark as more and more places clamoured to be included in the itinerary. Glass Spider? It is the name of a track on his new album, “Never Let Me Down,” which was released in April, and together with a single, “Day In, Day Out,” went straight into the upper reaches of the British Top Ten. He calls the album “a quite loving look back at some of the better times I’ve had.” His millions of fans will say his better times have been theirs as well. They have shared the joys of his music. Then there is informal talk, formal meetings, and script discussions for another film; this time with an old mate, Mick Jagger, but according to Bowie aides, the most important of whom is Ms Corrine Schwab, the protective brunette known as CoCo who has been his personal assistant for years, things cannot be finalised before mid-1988: there is too much going on for that.

Hollywood’s MGM studios bave confirmed that Jagger and Bowie have been given a script by Richard Price — Oscar-nomin-ated for the film "Color of Money” — in which the twosome play rival nightclub owners. They have already spent several hours conferring with a top impresario, Vito Bruno, whose 2001 nightspot featured in “Saturday Night Fever.” The working title of the script is “Rocket Boys.” Bowie’s foray into the film world has not been a waste. His latest epic was “Absolute Beginners,” in which he plays the wicked ad. man, Vendice Partners, who has a liking for tapdancing. Although Bowie’s appearance in the film can be measured in minutes, he won praise from the critics.

Memorable video

Curiously, they agree that his most memorable film work so far . could also be measured in minutes; three, in fact in the “Dancin’ in the Street” video he made with Mick Jagger. He progressed to the Broadway stage and in 1980 had enormous success as the deformed Victorian side-show freak, John Merrick, in “The Elephant Man,” a part which required guts (he had to do special exercises to contort his body before every performance) as well as talent. Bowie had both. He also had a knack of hitting the tabloid headlines, especially after admitting to a period of bisexuality in his late teens and early twenties, and a severe case of drug abuse. He was born on January 8, 1947, in Brixton, a tough area of south London, and moved into the middle-class outer London suburb of Bromley when he was six and his name was David Jones. He was a quiet boy who sang in the school choir and played the recorder, doing neither very well. Perhaps his parents agreed with that, for they bought their son a plastic saxophone when he was 12. He still has it. After school he got a job as an office junior in an advertising agency (shades of “Absolute Beginners”) and then went in for showbusiness. Three of his early groups, The King Bees, The Manish Boys, and The Lower Third, each recorded a single, but they got nowhere. About this time he changed his name from Jones to Bowie, after his Texan knife-throwing hero and inventor of the sharp Bowie knife, to avoid confusion with Davy Jones of The Monkees, who were all the rage at the time. When he was 17 and playing with The Manish Boys, Bowie

had a run-in with a precocious girl aged 14, who liked to hang round London’s famed music spot, the Marquee Club.

Dyed hair

Her name was Dana Gillespie, and she became an actress. One night she saw The Manish Boys; she did not think much of the group but fell for the singer, and invited him home. She recalled, “He had dyed blond hairdown to his shoulders; one of the first men I had . noticed like that. He looked great. I sneaked David up past my parents’ bedroom to the top floor and he stayed the night.” Gillespie was left in ho doubt about Bowie’s sexual orientation, but the same could not be said for her parents at first. She said, “When I introduced David to my father, he said afterwards that he had not known whether David was a man or a woman until he actually spoke.”

Gillespie visited Bowie’s home in Bromley. “He was one of the first people I had met who gave me a feeling that he did not love his parents like 1 loved mine. T realised people lived in a different way. I was completely ignorant of it, and the house seemed like a house with no love in it.” Whatever the reason, there were tragic circumstances surrounding the Jones’s family life. Three of Bowie’s aunts became mental patients, and he had a half-brother, Terry, who committed suicide while in a mental hospital. Bowie rejects the suggestion that the family traumas had any bearing on his career, yet the link seems undeniable. Many of the songs he wrote in the 1970 s were concerned with madness, and he even gave one of his stage characters the punning name “Aladdin Sane.” His appearance in his early years caused raised eyebrows. He was thrown out of The Lower Third group because he wore make-up and lacquered his bouffant hair. They were worried about his masculinity. Bowie was not worried. He was soon openly wearing dresses; his favourite was a blue-and-pink

flowered number that knocked him back £l5O, a considerable amount of money in those days. He had moved out of his parents’ home and camped in friends’ houses. He did not have a steady job. His first manager, Leslie Conn, said, "Although he was as broke as other kids, he walked around like a star. He believed in himself absolutely, and he was prepared to work very hard for success.” Although Bowie was now looking less and less like a boy, he was definitely interested in girls, although some would say he was having the best of both worlds. In 1970 he married Angie Barnett, an American actress, aged 18.

Zowie Bowie

In 1971 Bowie and Angie had a son whom in a flight of fantasy they christened Zowie. The lad now attends the Gordonstoun upper-crust public school in Scotland, whose roll of past pupils includes Prince Charles. Zowie is happiest when his chums call him “Joey,” a

name which has also v been noted by his dad, with whom he spends much of his holidays at the Bowie $5.6 million mansion by Lake Lausanne in Switzerland. In fairness, it must be said that Zowie was also given the names' of Duncan Hayward, neither 01/ which he likes as much as "Joey.” Music-wise, it was 1969 wher Bowie got his first Internationa, hit, a strange, spooky little son£ called “Space Oddity,” but tc date he has had 25 hit albums and more then 40 hit singles only Elvis Presley has done better, and that came after his death with a rush by fans to buy the “oldies.” On stage, Bowie created the bizarre extra-terrestrial Ziggy Stardust character, with huge platform-sole shoes, glittery tights, spangled suits and orange hair. Later there was “Diamond Dog” and “Thin White Duke.” Bowie began his big screen movie career in the title role of Nicolas Roeg’s “The Man Who Fell To Earth,” but he also had his share of flops, in “Just a Gigolo” and “The Hunger.” In contrast he scored a triumph as the British officer in the relatively low-budget “Merry

Christmas, Mr Lawrence,” a tale of Japanese prisoners of war. There was a starring role in “Labyrinth,” a fantasy adventure film made by Jim Henson, the man who created the Muppets.

Personality changes

Up to the end of the 1970 s controversy stuck to Bowie. He went through a series of personality changes. He suffered paranoid delusions, came within a whisker of a mental breakdown, and indulged very heavily indeed in cocaine. He was embroiled in legal battles with a succession of managers and then became a virtual recluse after high-tailing it to an anonymous apartment block in West Berlin. Then came a bitter, public divorce from Angie. Only someone with Bowie’s determination to succeed would have persevered through the setbacks he encountered on his way to the top. Now, the man who was so heavily into drugs is clean as a whistle; he has exchanged his

SSS S £» S 3 panions, j-swnrxw and when a writer gets to him he is open and charming. • - - ■ ■ ■> ■. ■ . ■ - . . ask mm about rock and roll and he will say, "A lot of us go into rock and roll so that we do not have to. get a job; apart from all the other things like lots of girls and everything else that is supposed to go with It. "But one of the chief and most endearing qualities of rock and roll music is that you think you do not have to work. Later on you wish to, God that you had stayed in advertising or accountancy or something, which would have been a doddle compared with some of the things you have to go through. “I’m as hard as nails. I have definite ideas about what I want to do with my life and my work, and I’m pretty unstoppable in those directions. “But there have been about a dozen dodgy books about me, so I think I must have developed a pretty thick skin. I’m not sure that rock-star books mean very much any more. A lot of us don’t have stories. A lot of us have just worked quite hard and done things quite well. It doesn’t mean you have a story. -' "When I’m not working I lead quite a quiet existence. I’m very self-contained; I can go for months without wanting to see anyone or go clubbing or partying. , “I’m" an avid reader. I like going for a walk or skl-ing. The Swiss are very blase about people who are famous. I go to the shops to get the shopping and they couldn’t care less. It’s so easy to live there. 1 “It is kind Of hard in Britain sometimes, but I get about a lot, more than people would imagine. When you don’t read about me, I’m moving about all over the place, but when I. want to be known somewhere, I’ll be known. I’m in and out of England the whole time. People just don’t know it. “These days I am an ageing rocker. It was well worth the waiting.” Ageing? With a 1987 diary as full of dates round the world as his/ who is he trying to kid? After all, he is old enough to know that life begins at 40. Copyright, Duo, 1987.