Blackstar Theory: The Last Works of David Bowie: 2 (Ex:Centrics)

Product Information

LK: Tony is very keen to say whenever he has the opportunity that Bowie’s voice was brilliant to the end. And he was in the room, so who can argue. However in the Whatley Last Five Years documentary, when they isolate the ‘Lazarus’ vocal, you can hear how raspy he sounds. There’s a heavy frail grandeur to Bowie’s late voice that I spend a bit of time trying to frame in the book. Thankfully, another feature of the period is the consistently great vocal takes Tony manages to draw from him, so there’s a lot of musical examples to dig into.

Bowie’s musical Lazarus (co-written with Irish playwright Enda Walsh) completes Thomas Jerome Newton’s story, and according to Walsh, is set inside a ‘morphine dream’. In interviews Walsh cited the work of British dramatist Dennis Potter, specifically The Singing Detective (BBC 1986), as an important reference. Potter’s own swan song, his final interconnected works, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus (BBC and Channel 4 1996), also seem to have been explicitly referenced here also. About the author: Leah Kardos is a senior lecturer in music at Kingston University London, UK, where she co-founded the Visconti Studio with music producer Tony Visconti. She specialises in the areas of record production, pop aesthetics and criticism, and exploring interdisciplinary approaches to creative practice. Well, that was a lovely read, thank you Chris. I have the book on my kindle and am looking forward to reading it in spare moments while travelling around the country to catch up with family. I live in the Forest of Dean so have long known of Cold Lazarus by Dennis Potter. But I wonder whether Leah Kardos mentions Leonora Carrington at all? As a symbolist poet who lived between Mexico City and New York with her wonderful weird stories I cannot see Bowie would not have been aware of her. Her short story, White Rabbits, has already been referenced by Mary Anne Hobbs, as the husband is called Lazarus and has bandaged eyes. The story ends with the character’s fingers dropping down like ‘shooting stars’ over the bannister to the ground. Also I wonder if the Lazarus line – ‘dropped my cell phone down below’ (which always seemed a strange line to me) may not be referencing Carrington’s book about her experiences in a mental hospital, ‘Down Below’. Another thing about the late period is the ensemble singing. It’s often an orchestra of voices beautifully arranged, walls of harmony, call and response, octaves and unisons, left and right spread out, sometimes barely audible—you realize, wow, it must have taken ages to do all of that.Bowie, 2008: “I’ve never been keen on traditional musicals. I find it awfully hard to suspend my disbelief when dialogue is suddenly song. I suppose one of the few people who can make this work is Stephen Sondheim with works such as Assassins.“ The Man Who Fell to Earth. 1976. Directed by Nicolas Roeg. David Bowie in Nicolas Roeg’s THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976). Someone recently said there will never be a definitive book on Bowie and I would probably have agreed. But now that I’ve read this book I’m not so sure. This is as good as it gets. CO: It’s amazing to think of Bowie sitting there going “am I past it? Do the kids not want to hear from me anymore?” Yes, it’s a name for a cancer lesion, although one usually associated with breast cancer, so its meaning in outer-space terminology is likely to have been far more significant for the Starman. As well as being the name of a “hidden planet” that the apocalyptically inclined think will crash into the Earth (“Guys! He knew it was coming!”) and another name for Saturn (“He won a Saturn acting award once!”), it’s also the term for the transitional state between a collapsed star and a singularity (a state of infinite value) in physics – which makes sense if Bowie is placing himself as the collapsed star, and the singularity the state he will enter after his death.

What a feast of thoughts and interpretations we have been awarded by this amazing man, I am so grateful to DB for the continuing fun.When explaining the genesis of the Lazarus script, co-writer Enda Walsh told the Financial Times that the pair ‘began to talk about death … about morphine. How the brain would wrestle with itself or what it would see in the moments before death. [Bowie said:] “Can we structure something about that?”.’ They talked about the psychotherapeutic noir of Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective and Bob Fosse’s cinematic ode to mortality All That Jazz (1979). ‘We discussed drugs and the drunken state a lot. How to construct something and place it behind the eyes of someone who is totally out of it. The film [Roeg’s adaptation] does it so brilliantly. We thought, we can do that on stage, too’. The setting in a New York penthouse with a view of 2nd Avenue, the fourteen year old Girl (played by Sophia Ann Caruso). In the play, Thomas wants and needs to die, but he can’t do this until he has successfully resisted temptation, confronted his own shadow and severed his attachment to the spectral image of his lost daughter. These details felt strangely specific when I saw the show in New York; they made a lot more sense after he died some four weeks later. When I saw it again during its run in London in 2017, it felt like a different show. CO: It’s still unclear to me, after all this time, whether Bowie, when he was putting out all of this stuff in his last years, had something like a complete design in mind. I guess I always saw him as someone who’d more draft extensive plans that would never come to fruition, as he’d abandon them to move onto something more interesting. But there’s a narrative logic to the 2013-2016 period, even if unintended. Do you think so, too? Do you see an overarching pattern?

Love is Lost (Hello Steve Reich Mix by James Murphy for the DFA – Edit)’ 2013. Directed David Bowie.

Abstract

LK: When The Next Day came out remember feeling ambivalent about it— for me it felt like the album was trying too hard, perhaps overcompensating for something. But I wanted to love it, and of course the first half is super-strong. I think those appraisals were battered by information overload—that’s how I came into it, really loving the good bits on it and hating stuff I thought was badly executed. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. 1920. Directed by Robert Wiene. Decla Film. Sketch of ‘somnambulist for Lazarus video’ – David Bowie How music technology can make sound and music worlds accessible to student composers in Further Education colleges