The Bowiesconti proxy: silent pop star plays puppet in the hands of his ventriloquist producer Visconti
❚ SHOCK HORROR REVELATION in today’s Times. David Bowie has been a member of Alcoholics Anonymous though seems to have abstained from drink 23 years ago. This is the bonus ball among many truths we’ve been getting closer to since the star’s 66th birthday comeback bombshell on Tuesday. Another is that he will “never do another interview again” and this itself comes from the mouth of his lifelong 68-year-old friend and producer Tony Visconti who is giving this interview to The Times. Visconti has become Bowie’s Voice on Earth, we’re told. And by the end of the two-page read, we’re so far into Smash Hits territory – Bowie’s fave TV shows are The Office and The Shield – that you’re gritting your teeth at the prospect of another 30 years of interview-by-proxy.
1 – A second Bowie single may be issued before the album The Next Day is released on March 11. And a second album is almost inevitable. “What he wants to do is make records. He does not want to tour,” says his Voice on Earth.
2 – An exclusive list of the 14 album tracks shows all-original material embracing adult themes of “tyrants, spies and soldiers” to reflect Bowie’s recent reading matter, as well as “love in the internet age”. Titles include Dirty Boys (about glam-rockers), Valentine’s Day (about a mass murderer), Set the World on Fire (about an unnamed female nightclub singer) while the track The Next Day is itself a gruesome number in which a man is hung, drawn and quartered in stereo (remember the final scene in Braveheart?) so you might have to look away now and have a lie-down.
HDQ in Braveheart 1995: Mel Gibson takes it like a man
3 – During Bowie’s cocaine-fuelled Berlin years recalled on the new single, Where Are We Now?, his Voice says: “We’d have both been dead if we’d carried on.” Visconti stopped taking coke in 1984. Both men went to AA and we’re invited to deduce that Bowie has passed his 23rd anniversary without a drink, placing his temperance decision at 1989, year of the Tin Machine album, itself an expression of musical regeneration.
4 – Since his heart op in 2004 rumours have circulated that Bowie also has cancer. “They’re categorically not true,” says the Voice. “He is incredibly fit because he takes care of himself. He looks rosy cheeked.”
5 – Big letdown for the gayers: while living in Berlin David and Iggy had separate bedrooms in their seven-room Hauptstrasse apartment. Did their relationship go beyond friendship? “No, absolutely not.” Aw, c’mon. What about the Ziggy years? “I never witnessed him with a boyfriend,” Bowiesconti declares. “He said Ziggy stardust was a persona.”
After slapping us with this big wet fish, perhaps Tony Visconti can rehearse a few laughs for his next major interview as the proxy David Bowie, otherwise Jonathan “The Joker” Ross will hog the limelight as usual.
JAN 13 UPDATE
➢ New from the Sunday Telegraph interview with the Voice on Earth: “ Despite all reports to the contrary, Visconti reveals that Bowie may actually perform these songs live. “He doesn’t want to tour any more. He’s had enough of it. But he hasn’t ruled out that he might do a show.”
Will there be another record? “We recorded 29 titles. We have at least four finished songs that could start the next album,” says Visconti. “If all goes well, we will be back in the studio by the end of the year. He’s back. Bowie has found out what he wants to do: he wants to make records. Nothing else.” ”
Divided Berlin: the wall shown in black places the U-Bahn station (blue) at Potsdamer Platz inside the Soviet sector, along with the S-Bahn station (green)
❚ THE NEW MUSIC VIDEO for Where Are We Now? raises challenges during David Bowie’s nostalgic Berlin city tour that his fans expect to decipher. Lesser mysteries were quickly cracked this week:
1 – The woman’s face on the cuddly toy is the video director’s wife Jacqueline Humphries.
2 – The T-shirt slogan “m/s Song of Norway” refers to both a retired and renamed cruise ship (Royal Caribbean has used Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life in its commercials), and an operetta that was made into a film starring Bowie’s onetime girlfriend Hermione Farthingale who inspired a song.
3 – The closing shots of the Siegessäule (Victory Column) resonate also as the title of Berlin’s gay community magazine.
4 – The lyric’s curious non-idiomatic phrase “walking the dead” coincidentally references the title of an American drama about a transgendered person.
But the real Poirot Puzzler raised by the opening line of the song is this: *How* did Bowie “get the train from Potsdamer Platz” (incidentally, or deliberately, misspelt on screen) to reach his Berlin haunts in the 70s? Today any of us can easily take the U2 towards Nürnberger Strasse, the lyric’s next destination, where once, he sings, he would sit in the cool Dschungel nightclub frequented by assorted popstars (his favourite seat was on a balcony overlooking the bar). We can also take the S1 line south from PP to the trendy Schöneberg district where Bowie used to share rooms with Iggy Pop.
But not when Bowie lived in Berlin, during the years now identified with his Berlin Trilogy of albums, 1976-79. Why not? Because of the 12-ft high Wall, fortified with minefields, anti-tank defences and ruthlessly guarded, the symbol of communism which had divided the city since 1961. As we see from the map (above) both the stations for the S-Bahn surface train line and the U-Bahn underground line lay on the East side of the wall within the Soviet sector.
In the late 70s the site of Potsdamer Platz was a wide-open wasteland on the East of the Wall, a No Man’s Land chillingly known as the Kill Zone, where guards could gun down the continuing stream of desperate East Berliners courageous enough to make a dash for the West.
Potsdamer Platz in 1961: the postwar wasteland is divided by the first low-rise Wall and was to become known as the Kill Zone
Bowie’s workplace, the Hansa Studios where he recorded Low and Heroes, actually overlooked the Wall from the American sector, in Köthener Strasse a few yards south of Potsdamer Platz. Catching sight of two lovers near the Wall inspired the theme for the number, Heroes, in 1977, one of his most creative song-writing periods.
But Bowie could not have taken his train from either of those stations because they had been closed and barricaded when the Wall was built. Western trains continued to cross East Berlin along lines which emerged in the West but they passed through without stopping at many such stations which became known as Geisterbahnhöfe (ghost stations). Concrete collars at tunnel entrances scraped the sides of the trains to deter escapees from clinging to them. Half a lifetime later, on March 3, 1992, the S1 stop in Potsdamer Platz was the last ghost station to reopen after the reunification of Germany.
Perhaps Bowie departed from some other station? What about the 19th-century regional railway terminus called Potsdamer Bahnhof, you say? It fed ritziness into the heart of the metropolis and Potsdamer Platz became one of Berlin’s busiest traffic intersections where famously Europe’s first traffic lights were installed in 1924. The whole area was, however, laid waste during World War Two and the last trains you could have taken from this station ran in 1945.
Ah, yes but what about the innovative M-Bahn, the Magnetic Levitation line which powered south from the Philharmonie, skirting the Wall by Potsdamer Platz as it headed down to the river? Sorry, this didn’t open until 1989.
So how on earth did David Bowie take his train from Potsdamer Platz?
Is our hero indulging some romantic fantasy on behalf of an East Berliner during the 70s, making a wistful trip to the freewheeling delights of Schöneberg and the KaDeWe department store that became an attainable dream only after the fall of the Wall – as he sings, by crossing the Bösebrücke on November 9, 1989?
And why the first word of the song? Why *had* he to get this train at all? He was well-known for cycling everywhere in Berlin, such was the personal freedom he enjoyed there. And why from Potsdamer Platz?
Potsdamer Platz in 1910: looking south towards the Potsdamer Bahnhof
JAN 16 INSIGHT FROM THE NME
❏ Bowie producer Tony Viscontisays of Where Are We Now?: “To me, it’s not about the three-years he spent in Berlin in the 70s. It feels like just one day he had an epiphany walking in the street.” So there we have it. A walk in the street. Puts our post above out with the trash. Still, it painted a picture of an era that is probably unimaginable for anybody who hadn’t visited the divided city between 1961 and 1989.
When Bonn became the capital of West Germany in 1949, the war-ravaged city of Berlin grew ever more desolate, despite the handful of nightclubs where hedonism was very much defined as the antidote to the privations of daily life. The Western sectors felt like a minor provincial city with a population of 2 million, mostly consisting of the elderly, because everybody else had left to make new lives elsewhere. Just turning 30, Bowie and Iggy were among the city’s youngest inhabitants and their work as musicians was one of the few productive industries in an enfeebled economy.
Nightclubbing 1977: Bowie and Iggy enjoy the Berlin nightlife
The Soviet sector, which we Westerners were privileged to visit, unlike its citizens wishing to make the opposite journey, felt tragic: rundown beyond the point of dilapidation, with high-rise Tower blocks in the brutalist Soviet style built to ease the pressure on a crowded population and signal the “modernity” of the East. As with visits to the Soviet Union, tourists were usually conscious of being followed or at least monitored by East German security personnel, and woe betide any local who behaved in an inappropriately friendly manner toward visitors! With the Stasi (state security service) relying on family members to inform on each other, the East became a society of subterfuge, with a black economy built less on cash than barter and influence at all levels of daily life.
+++ ❚ SURPRISE WAS THE SECRET WEAPON. Even the star’s longtime London publicists were told only on Friday. For months there must have been “sudden death” clauses in his 35 collaborators’ contracts to deter them from breathing a word about the 14 songs on his first album in a decade, or about yesterday’s haunting new single, realised in a resourcefully resonant music video that navigates those fertile but often fraught landmarks from Berlin in the 70s as if in Google Street View… every one a turning point… ghosts from the tragic city’s Cold-War hinterland as well as the singer’s own.
Driven by piano and synth, the song is a bittersweet elegy. Its poignant title asks Where Are We Now? and is rendered with suitable despair, while the accompanying images reinforce the singer’s seemingly mournful contemplations on “walking the dead”. Yet all comes clearer with repeated viewing when the self-deprecating humour brightens your moist eyes. The old fella’s tremulous voice, eroded half an octave lower than we remember, is courageously confessing with dignity and relief what all buddhists seek in the journey through life – enlightenment. There may be melancholy in his acceptance of mortality but it is unsentimental. “As long as there’s sun / As long as there’s rain” and crucially “As long as there’s fire”, then “You know, you know”.
The news broke at 5am in the UK (midnight in New York) on his 66th birthday, and the world’s media suddenly received the good news like a shot in the arm. No, Bowie had not retired, laid low after heart surgery in 2004, but was back with a bang. By breakfast-time BBC Radio’s flagship current affairs show Today rushed a critic into the studio to enthuse about the new ballad as legacy from Bowie’s so-called Berlin Trilogy of albums, 1976-79, produced by Tony Visconti, as is the new album. The veteran anchor John Humphrys empathised with a “weariness” he detected in the voice.
By 3pm the single was topping the British iTunes chart and by midnight the next day’s national press were trumpeting their finest prose stylists in spreads devoted to the last of the godlike popstars who define their era. This is the sizzle The Thin White Duke still generates. If Mr Humphrys thinks Bowie was sounding his age, in The Times Caitlin Moran thinks the song shows every year of Bowie’s age beautifully…
THE FOXED VOICE
➢ Caitlin Moran in The Times says Bowie arrived out of retirement overnight, like unexpected snow “It is a worn voice, a gentle voice, a voice with small burn-holes, slight foxing. Of all the things, it most reminded me of David Attenborough narrating some extraordinary murmuration of starlings, or a thaw. A voice that has a superior grasp of how large the universe is; a voice that has come to appreciate the value in simply being alive.”
THE LIVING POET
➢ Poet Alan Jenkins blogs at The Times Literary Supp and shares his elation at the arrival of a masterpiece “Almost from the first and unfailingly ever since, Bowie has been a byword for musical boldness and invention. His instinctive power as a lyricist has perhaps been somewhat overlooked – his characteristic note a combination of the shy and portentous, of confessional detail and unembarrassed declamation, of raw truthfulness and authentically barmy allegorizing. Where…? takes us haltingly into personal history and personal mortality, distilling from its simple, beautiful progressions an atmosphere of bewildered sorrow that is not entirely dispelled by the tender-stoical declarations of the final moments.”
➢ Neil McCormick in the Telegraph declares the perfect comeback “Lush, stately, beautifully strange, weaving resonant piano chords, decaying synths and echoing drums around a simple chord progression and a weary, tenderly understated, quietly defiant vocal, the ageing Starman reminisces about days in Berlin… It is to the slightly wonky, retro-futuristic ambience of late Seventies rock electronica that Where Are We Now? returns … It was a musical style influenced by one-time collaborator Brian Eno and once heralded for its icy futurism, but now it sounds familiar enough to be instantly accessible yet oddly contemporary. Retro synths are all the rage once again, early electronica deemed to have a quality of human warmth often absent in hi-tech digital pop.”
THE SELF PROMOTER
➢ Alexis Petridis in The Guardian on an object lesson in record promotion “The main reason it’s created such a fuss is simply because no one knew. It’s incredible that, in an era of gossip websites and messageboard rumours, one of the biggest stars in the world, presumed retired, can spend two years making a new album without the merest whisper of it reaching the public. But somehow he did it… Whatever The Next Day sounds like [the album due on March 11], he’s turned it into the biggest release of 2013 by the simple expedient of doing absolutely nothing other than make an album. Furthermore, he’s managed to maintain the myth and mystique that was always central to his stardom and his art in a world where rock and pop music has almost no myth or mystique left.”
THE WHISPERING SAGE
➢ At the Quietus Chris Roberts asks: After a decade of artlessness Bowie is back. So why are so many clowns complaining? “The delicately-sung single, Where Are We Now?, is not “instant”, or flash. It is not a sad by-numbers attempt to recapture old glories. It is very much Bowie, but it is a quivering ghost of a Bowie song, the imprint of his fabulous past gently laid over a forlorn, elegiac yet life-affirming drape of meditations and reveries about missing the old Europe and, possibly, youth. It is becoming of the man, and of the star. And it is becoming obvious that, after all this time, he wouldn’t have let it out of the house if he didn’t believe it would add to his body of work and polish his mythology. It is spectral, frail, yearning without chest-beating, candid in its few, clipped phrases and sighs concerning the heart’s filthy lessons. The crooning peacock is now a whispering sage.”
BOWIE’S BERLIN SIGHTS DECODED
➢ Helen Pidd, The Guardian’s former Berlin correspondent, helps identify key Berlin landmarks in Bowie’s video “In the 20s Potsdamer Platz was the place to be, full of sexy lesbians in smoking jackets and the sort of boys Christopher Isherwood fancied. Then we bombed it. After the war, the East Germans built the Berlin Wall around it, placing it in a no man’s land. If you’ve seen Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire, you’ll remember the old man sitting on a sofa in what purported to be the deserted Potsdamer Platz…
“The archetypal Berlin art studio-cum-squat: This is a modern cliche of the German capital. Bowie, in his enigmatic slogan T-shirt, looks like any other foreign immigrant who has come to Berlin to “do my art” (read: go to Berghain and get an asymmetric haircut). Like many of the city’s young pretenders, he is carrying a notebook and no doubt tells people at squat parties he is a writer.”
ECHOES OF EXTRAS?
+++ ❏ And in lighter vein…More than one fan has noticed that parts of the new melody bear a resemblance to Pathetic Little Fat Man, Bowie’s improvised tribute to Ricky Gervais in his BBC sitcom Extras in 2006 (above)
Banjo-man! Exclusive birthday photograph (Jimmy King )
❚ AFTER ZIGGY’S 40TH ANNIVERSARY HULLABALOO comes a unique selling exhibition of Bowie graphic art and memorabilia from his golden years 1969–1981. On display this week in London for the first time in 30 years is the original K. West sign that featured in Brian Ward’s covershot for Bowie’s springboard 1972 album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. The record sleeve itself has long been as iconic a London image as Abbey Road’s zebra crossing. At last, the illuminated sign from 23 Heddon Street has been rescued by a music industry veteran and restored, and is on show at the Movie Poster Art Gallery, run by 80s Mud Club regular, Tim Maddison. He revealed to Shapersofthe80s that it may be for sale “at the right price”.
The exhibition highlights celebrated images created for Bowie by talents such as Brian Duffy, Edward Bell, Masayoshi Sukita, Guy Peellaert, Steve Shapiro and Eric Stephen Jacobs. Original posters and large-format promotional displays on Bowie in the 70s are hard to come by, let alone buy, so this show is a treat. At the preview, a 3-ft wide original RCA in-store display for Diamond Dogs was snapped up at £1,250. A fab Scary Monsters in-store stand was still for sale today at £950.
Bowie graphics: five of the images for sale this week
❚ KNOWN AS THE MAN WHO changed the colour of Bowie’s left eye, painter George Underwood is showing his recently discovered 1975 oil painting of the Hunky Dory cover shoot [below] in London next month. He stumbled upon the 32 x 38-inch original while sorting through some old artworks and now it’s on sale for £16,000.
Bowie’s schoolfriend and former musician, Underwood as a painter adopted an imaginative style that refers to Bosch, Bruegel and mannerism. He is among an eclectic mix of ten contemporary artists selling direct through The Art for Art’s Sake Show at The Gallery in Cork Street next month. Rather more affordable Bowie mementoes are his limited edition giclée prints which include Width of a Circle (1969, £500), seen on the back cover of the UK David Bowie LP on Philips… Stardust Memories (1972, £350), a Ziggy era painting that was reproduced as a poster… The Man Who Fell to Earth (1975, £650), seen on the cover of the Pan Books film tie-in.
Rediscovered: George Underwood’s 1975 painting of the Hunky Dory cover
◼ STARMAN: HOW DAVID BOWIE LIT UP THE 1970s is the title of a two-session course coming up next month at London’s premiere adult-education institute, the City Lit. But you will have to get out of bed on two Sunday mornings to attend. The course costs £41 and its tutor, the music writer Toby Manning whose specialist subject is Pink Floyd, aims it at “music lovers generally” who will find out “how David Bowie’s songs, persona and style broke with 60s values and aesthetics and largely ‘invented’ the 70s”.
Toby promises lots of videos and says: “Watch how, through constant reinvention, Bowie’s relentless creativity set and reset the agenda for rock music throughout the 1970s and beyond.” Test your tutor’s mettle by viewing the stupendous Young Americans video from 1973 [above] and asking why Bowie is wearing those fabulous shoulders and what agenda did they set?
Afterwards, Toby promises, you should be able to “hold your own in any discussion about David Bowie”. So you’ll be ready to impress Mastermind’s 1.74 million viewers. Howzaboutthatthen!
Between the two national newspaper reports accompanying these snaps of Bowie as a “hoodie”, neither offers one new piece of information and all the pix are completely undated. Eagle-eyed fashionistas will notice in the first “takeaway lunch” shot without his zebra print scarf he sports different shoes from today’s pix taken en route to a restaurant. So either David has scoffed two lunches, or, let’s guess, they were taken on different days.
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MORE INTERESTING THAN MOST PEOPLE’S FANTASIES — THE SWINGING EIGHTIES 1978-1984
They didn’t call themselves New Romantics, or the Blitz Kids – but other people did.
“I’d find people at the Blitz who were possible only in my imagination. But they were real” — Stephen Jones, hatmaker, 1983. (Illustration courtesy Iain R Webb, 1983)
“The truth about those Blitz club people was more interesting than most people’s fantasies” — Steve Dagger, pop group manager, 1983
PRAISE INDEED!
“See David Johnson’s fabulously detailed website Shapers of the 80s to which I am hugely indebted” – Political historian Dominic Sandbrook, in his book Who Dares Wins, 2019
“The (velvet) goldmine that is Shapers of the 80s” – Verdict of Chris O’Leary, respected author and blogger who analyses Bowie song by song at Pushing Ahead of the Dame
“The rather brilliant Shapers of the 80s website” – Dylan Jones in his Sweet Dreams paperback, 2021
A UNIQUE HISTORY
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❏ Header artwork by Kat Starchild shows Blitz Kids Darla Jane Gilroy, Elise Brazier, Judi Frankland and Steve Strange, with David Bowie at centre in his 1980 video for Ashes to Ashes
VINCENT ON AIR 2026
✱ Deejay legend Robbie Vincent has returned to JazzFM on Sundays 1-3pm… Catch up on Robbie’s JazzFM August Bank Holiday 2020 session thanks to AhhhhhSoul with four hours of “nothing but essential rhythms of soul, jazz and funk”.
TOLD FOR THE FIRST TIME
◆ Who was who in Spandau’s break-out year of 1980? The Invisible Hand of Shapersofthe80s draws a selective timeline for The unprecedented rise and rise of Spandau Ballet –– Turn to our inside page
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UNTOLD BLITZ STORIES
✱ If you thought there was no more to know about the birth of Blitz culture in 1980 then get your hands on a sensational book by an obsessive music fan called David Barrat. It is gripping, original and epic – a spooky tale of coincidence and parallel lives as mind-tingling as a Sherlock Holmes yarn. Titled both New Romantics Who Never Were and The Untold Story of Spandau Ballet! Sample this initial taster here at Shapers of the 80s
CHEWING THE FAT
✱ Jawing at Soho Radio on the 80s clubland revolution (from 32 mins) and on art (@55 mins) is probably the most influential shaper of the 80s, former Wag-club director Chris Sullivan (pictured) with editor of this website David Johnson
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