For a while, after the emergency heart surgery he underwent in 2004 for a severely blocked artery, a sudden illness in the middle of a 62-date tour of Europe and North America, like a tightrope walker falling from a tightrope, caught completely by surprise, seemed like Realityreleased in 2003, would be David Bowie's last album.
A sort of imaginary sequel to that continuation of Scary Monsters which was never made, Reality also proposed a possible farewell title, a question as much as an answer. But before the illness there were signs of further revelations, a gaze turned forward, towards a sort of final debut, pacified, resolved, profoundly revealing, yet always changing, a Bowie who, beyond reality and the empty spaces that surround it, could finally be himself.
Instead, the reality that followed was one of profound, disturbing and fascinating uncertainty. After years of hearing a knock on the door in the dead of night, as if the old death fetishist should really open up to what D.H. Lawrence, in his haunting 1914 poem about art and transcendence, Song of a Man Who Has Come Throughcalled the three strange angels. (Lawrence was one of Bowie's favorite writers; his modernist, humanist, but above all scandalous and full of strong expressions novel, Lady Chatterley's lover (1928), which paved the way for the freedoms of the '60s and '70s that Bowie reveled in, was on his list of 100 favorite books.)
Angels represent the difficult, sometimes frightening, elements of change and transformation, pushing the individual to embrace a new phase of life, to face the ultimate complexities of existence and to discover hidden spaces to explore.
The messages of affection and support that arrived after the news of the heart attack were a sort of dress rehearsal for that wave of pain, gratitude and bewilderment that would accompany his death twelve years later. But it wasn't yet time to write the final word. There was still a lot to sort out, loose ends.
At times it seemed that too much was expected of him, that too much was read into his songs and his story, attributing to him a responsibility that he had never asked for. Or maybe yes, maybe it was precisely his insistence, his passing through storms unscathed and being reborn every time like David Bowie, with that awareness that poetry, performance, theater and art are inextricably linked to healing and growth, and that, deep down, we all have an ancestral, even if often unconscious, need for rituality, enchantment and myth.
He was truly an heir to the ancient traditions, one who believed in mystery, one who gave credence to DH Lawrence's three angels. After a sudden and unexpected encounter with destiny, a vivid vision of the final enigma, a blank screen, he discovered that, after all, there was still a lot of life ahead of him – although perhaps not to be lived at the pace he was accustomed to, and probably without a new album on the horizon.
As he said from his hospital bed, as he pulled himself together with classic British “hold on and carry on” aplomb, he would not write a song about what had happened to him. He didn't want to talk about the end, much less what comes immediately after, at least until he had tied up some loose ends.
Every now and then he let some ideas leak out, he appeared sporadically in public, he indulged in some guest performances, he tried to reconstruct his existence in forms yet to be invented. But at times he truly seemed to have become the faded, self-effacing figure he had only played on the screen, one who metaphorically faded into the margins alongside Thomas Pynchon and Syd Barrett, becoming a master of the art of living in the present with nothing new to declare, occasionally spotted heading into the mountains.
His energy always pushed him to look forward, to feel that, finally, he was really starting again. The man curious about everything, who always found a way to pour that interest into the next song, into the next cycle of songs, had arrived at a real turning point, which required a profound change of attitude and image.
Illness and fragility pushed him into a sort of exile, where the mystery thickened around his name and the silences that stretched out between apparitions, messages, appearances and an increasingly rarefied musical production. Any rebirth or renewal in the last years of his life manifested itself in different forms, with a new way of conceiving himself as a project, treating his existence as a work of art, destined to be fulfilled only with a death that, suddenly, was fast approaching.
Realitythe last example of Bowie's maturity, came out amidst the usual skirmishes of critics, trying to decide where to place him in his story – the best since which album, or perhaps just “nothing much”, a positive sign that Bowie could still achieve himself or, simply, continue to be himself. However, it seemed too early to really consider it his musical testament, but if it really had been the last album, then the last track of David Bowie's last album would have been Bring Me the Disco King. Which, for Bowie at least – he didn't know what you thought – suggested that it was never too early to start planning the end.
That song had gone through many changes, born during the sessions of Black Tie White Noisethen sounded superficial and obvious, too similar to its title, a pure and simple album, without that hint of venom that would have made it really interesting. He said he had also considered it for Earthlingbut where was the disorientation, the strange atmosphere, something that suited the winking and provocative shows he was putting on at the time, bare in their direct and no-frills energy?
Something about the evocative reminders of the Disco King's life and journey through the twentieth century could easily have appeared in Hours or Heathenpart of that memory trilogy along with Earthlingwhile setting the stage for the years to come.
It was around the time that his new addiction – after records, books, the recording studio, sex, drugs, Eno, fame, travel, collecting, Iman, all those things that helped him adapt to the world – became the Internet, the ultimate tool of pleasure and personal transformation, which he could predict, and see where it was going, before most – and also where it was taking humanity, with algorithms and bots pushing everyone here and there, more connected than never, yet more alone than ever.
But he was keeping the song, working on it, letting it grow in his mind, so that when he sang it, it would feel like he could feel his own heart and sense the approaching, darker future. In the end it was Mike Garson – who had made it rich Aladdin Sane of madness, of a vital leap and here he added a vigorous body movement and a twisted gait – and Tony Visconti, about to become his producer until the end, to help Bowie complete it. Not as a record, nor as an elaborate record, but as traces of raw and lived experience.
It's Bowie's theatre, remembering a time, but somehow not looking back, when it seemed that pop – or rock – music could define a new free time. The song is a series of fragments, loops, statements, motifs and moments, placing it in different spaces against a backdrop of alienation, lingering in the groove and then stopping. It almost seems like the last two records I listened to before finishing it were Hold On by Tom Waits and Transmission by Joy Division.
It begins as if it were truly the end of something, perhaps of the world, perhaps of some sort of series that existed only in his mind, or a road trip, a fever dream, a life that contained something of his own, the life of a visionary within that of a loner, expressing a slight regret for all that excess and complacency.
Two or three verses, and some sentences, cut and stitched together with a taste that would have made Luis Buñuel smile smugly and make Lou Reed burst into a rare laugh, come directly from Diamond Dogsfrom Scary Monstersand can be heard echoing in the latest songs and dark fairy tales of Blackstar. He continues to be surprised by his own reflection, to find connections between unrelated things, with the mentality of a Parisian flâneur wandering the galleries of Paris.
Maybe, when he was making it, he really meant it Reality was his last album, one of those records that continued the sequence begun 36 years earlier, a great release that spanned the decades, somewhere between My Way And Exit Music for a Film. He is abandoning the old habit of releasing records at a constant pace and accompanying them with grueling world tours – a habit that will ultimately turn against him – but, although still full of energy, he suggests that soon there will be nothing left to publish. It is the end of the journey; the end of all that continuity.
Taken from the book David Bowie. Beyond space and time by Paul Morley (Hoepli).
