If our love song could fly over mountains (4/11/16)

For one reason or another, I've been thinking about David Bowie quite a bit lately.

This is nothing new, I've spent a huge amount of my adult life thinking about David Bowie; spent the summer of 1980 - where I really discovered him via a tape that contained Hunky Dory on one side and Aladdin Sane on the other (and as I write I've hit shuffle on the Bowie songs on my iPod, which once seemed futuristic and now feels like old technology, a relic from another age, and the first track that shows up is Watch That Man from Aladdin Sane, the moment when Ziggy became simultaneously American and a pun and a mediation on what fame costs although I knew nothing about that at the age of 16) and the vinyl release of Ashes to Ashes and the Scary Monsters LP and the clip of him doing the revamped Space Oddity on the Kenny Everett show - pretty much obsessed.

Thinking about him now because I'm reading the Paul Morley 'meditation' (*book isn't quite the right word, biography definitely isn't) on Bowie and 'How (he) made a world of difference'. And, yes, the first paragraph is deliberately tortuous in its construction in order to mirror/aspire to Mr Morley's writing style. Nothing happens by accident; everything is designed, everything is intended. Grant Morrison said that writing is a form of magic; we create worlds, we invent lives. In his bolder statements, Morrison says that we become gods. I'm not going that far.

(Dreaming My Life from the much forgotten Hours album - sits nicely as a theme with the above paragraph. And as we hit 'The Heart's Filthy Lesson' let's see how that segues into what comes next.)

I met Paul Morley at the Philharmonic event for the book. Had the book signed by the author. Chatted to him briefly whilst having it signed and, slightly before that, at the bar where I wasn't fast enough to  buy him a drink. Felt I owed him a drink for his NME work in the eighties. Spoke to a friend slightly earlier, talked about how *that* NME was our NME (in fairness, the friend wrote for that NME but we were still talking about Morley and Penman and what they meant to us at that time). I didn't mention to Mr Morley (and remember, he wasn't just an NME writer, he was also part of the Art Of Noise and very much the man who told us that 'Frankie (said) Arm The Unemployed') that he was quite probably the reason that I never became a journalist. Told my friend this, though. Specifically, told my friend this:

'At some point in the early eighties I applied to do journalism at Sheffield, at that point the only NUJ backed course in the country. Apparently. I walked the exam. Absolutely walked it. The interview though? Three blokes in their sixties in a room in Sheffield Uni.
"Who do you want to write like? Who inspires you?"
Morley and Penman.
"Yes, you're the fifth person to say that this morning."
And he looked at the book I was carrying and asked,
"What are you reading at the moment?"
Shogun. James Clavell. (It was very big at that point.)
"Ah, yes, I read that when it came out."

And I knew. Should have said Paul Foot, should have carried something by Wittgenstein or Sartre.

(Bang Bang from Never Let Me Down. Better than you remember.)

I didn't tell Paul Morley this. We spoke, briefly, about the point he'd made while my other mate, Jamie, interviewed him on stage; the point that he'd made about how he couldn't approach the book chronologically because Bowie's life wasn't chronological, because we all discovered our Bowie in different ways at different times. He discovered his Bowie through Hunky Dory as the Bowie who was making Hunky Dory and moving forward to Ziggy, I discovered mine through Hunky Dory but mine had already done all the things that Morley's Bowie would do before I discovered him. I had all the "Heroes" and Lodger and Low and Diamond Dogs and Young Americans to work back through.

And that's where a slight digression is needed. If there had been anything other than digressions to this point.

The Gouster. It had been rumoured for years. Bootlegged, talked about, bits had appeared in random places, at random moments; there was another Young Americans before Young Americans. There was an album that didn't contain Fame or Across The Universe but contained the drama of Who Can I Be Now and Its Gonna Be Me. There was a Young Americans that was called The Gouster (or Shillin' The Rubes) and it was better than Young Americans.

And now, now that we don't have him anymore, it's here and it is. It takes some of the same songs, takes some of them in different versions, different mixes, different clothes, moves them round a bit, changes their order, their purpose and becomes something else. It becomes darker, broken, depressed, uncertain but certain of its uncertainty. It takes the eventual album's title track and puts it at the end of all this despair and searching and the diet of milk, peppers and cocaine and the illusion of triumph and joy vanishes and the American dream seems hollow and false. And in election week, in this election week, that seems pretty bloody accurate. (Andy Warhol from Hunky Dory, you want to reflect on the state of the States, here's Andy to show you that everything is surface.) Basically, it's a classic. If it had come out at the time, we'd be talking about it as possibly his very best. It shows, very clearly, that the art is in the selection, in the choice that you make with the work, the story you tell could be one thing, could be another, becomes the story that you decide that you're telling at that very point. (Deletes a sentence at this point as it doesn't fit the story he decided to tell in that paragraph.)

So I talked briefly - less time than that paragraph took to write - to Paul Morley about the fact that chronology was unimportant and that my son had basically discovered all Bowie, with the exception of Blackstar, as something that already existed and that meant that Fall Dog Bombs The Moon was as valid as Jean Genie. And he agreed with this and pointed out that his publishers quite definitely weren't convinced.

Everything is connected, chronology is nothing. Or an accident. Or a way we choose to view things. That's not Morley, that's me. If you think that's cod-philosophy then I take the blame. And manage to insert a fish joke.

So I tested the chronology concept. And I started the book. And the book starts with the button eyed Bowie at the end of the Lazarus video, slipping back into the wardrobe and considers what he would think there. And as I read this, I listened to the young Bowie, the very young Bowie, the first one, the pre-fame one who made There Is A Happy Land and Sell Me A Coat and Love You Till Tuesday and, yes, Laughing Gnome. And the book moves very quickly and very suddenly into his passing. And for a moment you're in the room with him and his family and at some point we all know what that room's like. Reading through that moment, listening to the young Bowie, the one we suddenly didn't have? Nearly broke me. The idea that we didn't have a Bowie in the world any more? Incomprehensible. That we would never have new Bowie again? Absurd.

And then, suddenly, there was new Bowie. And it was 6Music that had it again. When I Met You, from the Lazarus show, from the stage play that is his last actual work in the same way that Blackstar is his last actual work. It sounded like Blackstar but it didn't. There was a drive, an energy, an urgency, a beat, a forward movement. There were two Bowies singing with each other. There were multiple Bowies circling. And there was guitar. Garagey rhythm guitar. There was, quite definitely, a touch of the Velvets in there. The last track we have from Bowie, and it's the last track on the second disc on the Lazarus soundtrack, goes right back to the early Bowie. And chronology becomes something for other people again.

So I bought the Lazarus soundtrack. And I bought it for two reasons; I bought it for the fact that it's the last 'new' work that we have (until there's more that's found that we didn't realise was always there and becomes new by virtue of not having been heard before) and I bought it for the fact that it takes a body of work and selects from it and moves it round and dresses it in new clothes and uses it to tell a new story. Changes the chronology.

And that interested me because we've just done that with Silver Meadows.

I'll come back to this.

The soundtrack works. Not at first, not completely, but ultimately.  The song choices aren't obvious. It's not a jukebox musical that works with the hits to create entertainment; no Space Oddity, Ashes to Ashes, Fame, Fashion, China Girl, Let's Dance. It's a thing made from This Is Not America and Always Crashing In The Same Car and It's No Game and Where Are We Now. It's Bowie's choice and it's the story that he wanted to tell. At that point, with those songs.

(And It's No Game has just come on the iPod, nothing is ever accidental)

And there's a moment of utter genius. Michael C Hall (David in Six Feet Under, Dexter in...well, obviously) starts to sing Absolute Beginners. And at first it's just him and he's a cappella and it's Absolute Beginners but it sounds for all the world like it could have come from the soundtrack EP to Baal, the film that Bowie made for the BBC in the years where I really discovered him and then the band breaks in but it's more of the sound of a band in a room just playing for the hell of it than the sound of a produced, finished record. And both things are glorious. And the song's glorious anyway, so glorious that the beginning, that guitar chord and then the 'ba-ba-ba-ooo' that brings us in, became my ringtone as soon as the technology to make that kind of thing happen existed. Chronology? It's not a thing, everything connects.

Which is how I connect this to Silver Meadows. A piece about Bowie that becomes a piece about me? Why not? I'm writing this, it can't help but be about me, every word here is about me; I chose them, I placed them, I cut and pasted that last paragraph like you wouldn't believe so that I could tell the story that I wanted to tell and move the point forward to here. the writer can't be absent from the piece, the writer IS the piece.

Silver Meadows. If you've been watching closely you've seen me drop hints, pass things on. I've passed the whole album on to you. The album's wonderful. Genuinely, the only thing that I've listened to this year more than I've listened to Silver Meadows is Blackstar.

(And of all the Bowie on the iPod, as I write about Lazarus, the universe gives me Bowie's own version of Dirty Boys, a song he chose to tell his new story with.)

So you've seen me mention Vinny Peculiar. Silver Meadows is his. It's his thirteenth album in a career containing songs that, if you're into the kind of music that I'm into, you'll wish that you'd discovered earlier; wistful, witty, yearning, nostalgic, ironic, heartfelt. And catchy as hell.

Silver Meadows is a concept album. There, I've said it. We're grown ups, we can deal with concept albums now. It's about mental health in the eighties, at that point where the new ideas collided with the old ideas. And with the album, Vinny had a collection of notes of what the songs meant and who they were about and what the characters in those wonderfully catchy, wistful, sad, yearning, comedic songs wanted and who they were and what happened to them. And every single song was a self encapsulated story.

And I sat down with the album and the notes and I moved things around and put them in new clothes and added a character that didn't exist and called him Vinny so that he could be Vinny but not Vinny at the same time and I saw things through his eyes. And then through everybody else's eyes. And I took a song from here and put it over here and I told a story. And then we talked about that story and what those characters did and what they wanted and we moved some of their thoughts around and some of the things that one person said and sang became the things that another person said and sang. And we chose the story that we wanted to tell with those songs at that time.

And that's the second reason that I bought Lazarus. Because we'd basically just done the same thing. We'd created a world, created ideas and thoughts that hadn't existed and now did. And in the middle of the play, in the middle of the musical, we talk about chronology and how everything's connected. The characters hadn't been connected and now they were, there was a world that they were sharing, a world that will be shared on a stage. And when we started this we had no idea that a man we both thought about a great deal was carrying out a similar trick. David Bowie had always wanted to write a musical; he'd been talking about it since the seventies. Nobody saw it coming. And when it did, they didn't see that it would come as his last statement, it would come as something that was here after him. But then, everything is here after him. Everything he's done remains and grows and you find all this new stuff that's always been lurking in the corners of the internet.

Lazarus started off-Broadway. It's not about the money it's about the story that you choose to tell. Bowie took the songs you didn't expect and told a new story with them. Quadrophenia? Tommy? They tell the story that they told in the first place. They're rock operas. Bowie didn't write a rock opera, he staged a play, he told a new story. We took an album that wasn't even released at the time and we used it to tell a new story based on the stories that it already told. Nobody else was doing that. We have something unique. We did something unique. Nobody else did anything like this; just us and Bowie.

Have I just compared us to Bowie. Yeah, what of it? It's there, in Blackstar; "Something happened on the day he died, spirit rose a metre and stepped aside, somebody else took his place and bravely cried, I'm a Blackstar." It's a challenge, it's a challenge to carry on the work, to take the moments that he created, that inspired us, and use them to tell a new story.

And the connections? The details that show that everything's connected?

The first time that I met Vinny Peculiar he was playing on a bill to launch an EP by my friend, Reid. Vinny was acoustic with a pianist accompanying. And they moved into this tune with chords that sounded familiar and, as they did, Reid looked over at me and smiled, because he knew what was coming and knew what it was going to mean when I realised.

"Blue, blue, electric blue, that's the colour of my room...."

And that tune arrives halfway through the Lazarus soundtrack as well. David's own version in amongst all the versions of his work carried on by the others in the cast. And it's like God speaking, like a transmission from another, better world and, like hearing When I Met You for the first time, it's like having him back in the room for a moment. Which is how chronology folds over itself again.

And so is this. Reid introduced me to Vinny, thought we'd like each other, thought we'd be able to work well together and was right. Among other things, Reid was in the film that I wrote, Slip Away. And that film was shared on twitter by lots of very kind people. And lots of those kind people said nice things about it. And one of those people was Duncan Jones, the director of Moon and Source Code and Warcraft. And I had a brief twitter conversation with Duncan about this short film that we'd made and I had this moment where I suddenly thought, "Oh Jesus, I'm talking to David Bowie's son."

And Duncan shared the film. And I know his Twitter account was followed by the @davidbowieofficial account so.....there's no way of knowing but maybe, just maybe....... you never know do you? After all, the world's smaller now and the connections are closer and everything, absolutely everything, is connected.

And that, all of that, is why, and what, I've been thinking about David Bowie.