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DAVID: Time.
One of the most complex expressions.
Memory made manifest.
It's something that straddles past and future
without ever quite being present.
Or rather, it at first seems indifferent to the present.
There's a tension of a most unfathomable nature.
The word desires to be understood.
To have meaning.
But you somehow feel that it's not you yourself
that the word is addressing.
It washes over you,
holding a dialogue with something arcane
that's maybe not mortal.
And you feel intrigued.
Captured even.
You're aware of a deeper existence.
Maybe a temporary reassurance that indeed
there is no beginning, no end.
And all at once, the outward appearance
of meaning is transcended.
And you find yourself struggling to comprehend
a deep and formidable mystery.
All is transient.
Does it matter?
Do I bother?
[INCHWORM SONG]
♪ Inchworm, Inchworm ♪
♪ Measuring the marigolds ♪
♪ You and your... ♪
DAVID: All those moments
will be lost in time...
like tears...
Dust...
Cover me moon dust.
Cover me...
[HALLO SPACEBOY SONG]
♪ Spaceboy, you're sleepy now ♪
♪ Your silhouette is so stationary ♪
♪ You're released, but your custody calls ♪
♪ And I want to be free ♪
♪ Don't you want to be free ♪
♪ Do you like girls or boys? ♪
♪ It's confusing these days ♪
♪ But Moondust will cover you ♪
♪ Cover you ♪
♪ So bye bye love ♪
♪ Yeah bye bye love ♪
♪ Hallo, Spaceboy ♪
♪ This chaos is killing me ♪
♪ Hallo, Spaceboy ♪
NEIL: Ground to Major, bye bye, Tom
DAVID: ♪ This chaos is killing me ♪
NEIL: ♪ Dead the circuit, countdown's wrong ♪
DAVID: ♪ This chaos is killing me ♪
NEIL: Planet Earth, is control on?
DAVID: ♪ So sleepy now ♪
NEIL: ♪ Do you wanna be free? ♪
BOTH: ♪ Don't you wanna be free? ♪
♪ Do you like girls or boys? ♪
♪ It's confusing these days ♪
DAVID: ♪ But moondust will cover you ♪
♪ Cover you ♪
♪ So bye bye love ♪
♪ Yeah, bye bye love ♪
♪ Hallo Spaceboy ♪
♪ Spaceboy, Spaceboy... ♪
WOMAN: I wanted to see him.
MAN: What are you so upset about?
GIRL: I wanted to see him.
They said he was coming round the back.
I've been waiting for ages to see him.
MAN: Why are you so upset?
GIRL: He's smashing.
GIRL 2: I kissed him! I kissed his hand!
[HALLO SPACEBOY SONG]
DAVID: ♪ Hallo Spaceboy ♪
♪ Hallo, hallo. ♪
DICK CAVETT: Rumors and questions have arisen,
such as who is he, what is he, where did he come from?
Is he a creature of a foreign power?
Is he a creep? Is he dangerous?
Is he smart, dumb, nice to his parents,
real, a put-on, crazy, sane, man, woman, robot?
What is this?
Ladies and gentlemen, David Bowie.
[WILD EYED BOY FROM FREECLOUD SONG]
♪ Solemn faced ♪
♪ The village settles down ♪
♪ Undetected by the stars ♪
♪ Hangman plays the mandolin ♪
♪ before he goes to sleep ♪
♪ And the last thing on his mind ♪
♪ Is the Wild Eyed Boy imprisoned ♪
♪ 'Neath the covered wooden shaft ♪
♪ Folds the rope into its bag ♪
♪ Blows his pipe of smolders ♪
♪ Blankets smoke into the room ♪
♪ And the day will end for some ♪
♪ As the night begins for one ♪
♪ Staring through the message in his eyes ♪
♪ Lies a solitary son ♪
♪ From the mountain called Freecloud ♪
♪ Where the eagle dare not fly ♪
♪ And the patience in his sigh ♪
♪ Gives no indication ♪
♪ For the townsmen to decide ♪
♪ So the village dreadful yawns ♪
♪ Pronouncing gross diversion ♪
♪ As the label for the dog ♪
♪ Oh, "It's the madness in his eyes" ♪
♪ As he breaks the night to cry ♪
♪ It's really me ♪
♪ Really you and really me ♪
♪ It's so hard for us to really be ♪
♪ Really you and really me ♪
♪ You'll lose me, though I'm always ♪
♪ Really free ♪
♪ Yeah... ♪
[ALL THE YOUNG DUDES SONG]
♪ Jimmy rapped all night about his suicide ♪
♪ How he'd kick it in the head when he was 25 ♪
♪ All that speed jive ♪
♪ Don't want to stay alive when you're 25 ♪
♪ Lucy's stealing clothes from unlocked cars ♪
♪ Freddy's got spots ♪
♪ from ripping off the stars from his face, honey ♪
♪ A funky little boat race ♪
♪ The television man is crazy ♪
♪ Saying we're juvenile delinquent wrecks ♪
♪ But, man, I need a TV when I've got T. Rex ♪
♪ Hey, brother, you guessed ♪
♪ I'm a dude ♪
♪ All the young dudes ♪
♪ Carry the news ♪
♪ Boogaloo dudes ♪
♪ Carry the news ♪
♪ All the young dudes ♪
♪ Carry the news ♪
♪ Boogaloo dudes Yeah ♪
♪ Carry the news ♪
[OH! YOU PRETTY THINGS SONG]
♪ Wake up you sleepy head ♪
♪ Put on some clothes, shake up your bed ♪
♪ Put another log on the fire for me ♪
♪ I've made some breakfast and coffee ♪
♪ I look out my window what do I see ♪
♪ A crack in the sky and a hand... ♪
♪ Reaching down... ♪
♪ To me... ♪
♪ All the nightmares came today ♪
♪ And it looks as though they're here to stay... ♪
[LIFE ON MARS? SONG]
♪ It's a God-awful small affair ♪
♪ To the girl with the mousy hair ♪
♪ But her mummy is yelling, "No" ♪
♪ And her daddy has told her to go ♪
♪ But her friend is nowhere to be seen... ♪
MAN: He's just another fella, you know?
WOMAN: No, he's not. He's different.
MAN: Well, nobody like him can produce the music.
MAN 2:
WOMAN:
MAN: Davie's the greatest, and I'll say it again.
Dave's the greatest,
and I'll say it again, Dave's the greatest.
And I seen him onstage, and he was fantastic.
I'll follow that bloke anywhere 'cause he's the greatest.
And I'll say it again, he's the greatest.
MAN 2: Listen, you don't have to be bent to wear makeup.
It looks good, so why not wear it?
WOMAN: Even if it's camp, but he's sexy, isn't he?
Sort of thing, really.
DAVID: If I can tart it all up enough,
maybe people will see that it has a lot to do with just them.
INTERVIEWER: What, with reflection?
DAVID: Yeah, that it is really
a reflection of what they're like.
HOST: Mr. Powell, Mr. Jenkins.
[indistinct]
Businessmen in general...
Best watch it.
INTERVIEWER: How are you?
DAVID: I'm very well, thank you. How are you?
INTERVIEWER I'm fine.
DAVID: Good. How are you? How are you?
INTERVIEWER: You, uh, have to get the gear on
in order to project yourself.
I mean, were you a nobody who suddenly thought,
"Jesus, I must get into the scene by some other way"?
DAVID: I never asked Jesus for a think, no.
It was always on my own initiative.
And...
When I was 14, I became a Mod,
and it just carried on from there.
I've always dressed in what I considered clothes
that are exciting for me,
um, to prevent me becoming humdrum
so that I would receive reaction from people
which would encourage me to write.
INTERVIEWER: You will have obviously as many men followers
-as you have women followers. -DAVID: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: I mean, you haven't been shy about
declaring a certain air of bisexuality.
DAVID: Not at all. I know quite a few men.
WOMAN: Some people feel you're--
by saying you're bisexual.
by-- by kind of flaunting that in a way--
DAVID: Who's flaunting it?
INTERVIEWER: Why do you think that bisexuality in,
say '72, '73 has become a common-- not a common,
but an accepted kind of deal.
Why do you think we have moved into that
era of liberal behavior?
DAVID: Once upon a time, your father,
my father, everybody's father, I presume,
wanted a good job, with a good income, or reasonable income.
Some chance of promotion to secure their family life.
Um, where's the camera?
You're probably fine there, and that's where it ended.
But now, people want a role in society.
They want to feel that they have a position.
They want to be an individual,
and I think there's a lot of searching to find
the individual within oneself.
INTERVIEWER: Right, and how about the shoes?
Are those men's shoes, or women's shoes,
or bisexual shoes?
DAVID: They're shoe shoes, silly.
DAVID: There was a feeling of excitement and titillation
about moving in areas
which were forbidden to the rest of society.
From micro to macro, from yin to yang,
from male to female,
there is no scissor cut. No absolute.
I believe that there was an unconscious move to create
a high priest form from the line of the Greek gods
who could procreate themselves.
Somebody who was at a super level
to we regular mortals, because of his androgynous nature,
being somebody that incorporated
both feminine and masculine attributes.
[MOONAGE DAYDREAM SONG]
♪ I'm an alligator ♪
♪ I'm a mama-papa comin' for you ♪
♪ I'm the space invader ♪
♪ I'll be a rock 'n' rollin' bitch for you ♪
♪ Keep your mouth shut ♪
♪ You're squawking like a pink monkey bird ♪
♪ And I'm bustin' up my brains for the words ♪
Know I am.
♪ Keep your 'lectric eye on me, babe ♪
♪ Put your ray gun to my head ♪
♪ Press your space face close to mine, love ♪
♪ Freak out in a moonage daydream, oh yeah! ♪
♪ Don't fake it baby ♪
♪ Lay the real thing on me ♪
♪ You know, the church of man, love ♪
♪ Is such a holy place to be ♪
♪ Don't fake it, baby ♪
♪ Make me know you really care ♪
♪ Make me jump into the air ♪
♪ If you dare ♪
♪ Keep your 'lectric eye on me, babe ♪
♪ Put your ray gun to my head ♪
♪ Press your space face close to mine, love ♪
♪ Freak out in a moonage daydream, oh yeah! ♪
DAVID: It was a pudding, you know?
It was a pudding of new ideas.
I think we took it on our shoulders
that we were creating the 21st century in 1971.
We wanted to just blast everything in the past.
Question all the established values, all the taboos.
Everything is rubbish and all rubbish is wonderful.
[MOONAGE DAYDREAM SONG CONTINUES]
♪ Keep your 'lectric eye on me, babe ♪
♪ Put your ray gun to my head ♪
♪ Press your space face close to mine, love ♪
♪ Freak out in a moonage daydream, oh yeah! ♪
♪ Freak out ♪
♪ Far out ♪
♪ In a... ♪
WOMAN: I just didn't... to this.
I've never seen anything like this before.
WOMAN 2: See, I'm just a space cadet, he's the commander.
MAN: What universe is that?
MAN 2: Bowie universe.
WOMAN: Now nobody's scared to walk around like that,
are they? He's done it, ain't he.
He's broke through a barrier, now, ain't he?
WOMAN 2: I guess I'm living my fantasy, you know?
MAN: What's your fantasy?
WOMAN 2: Oh, Bowie.
MAN: I like people who are AC/DC.
You know what I mean?
INTERVIEWER: Do the clothes, you are trying to say,
are the clothes expressed now your own personality?
DAVID: Um, no, that I've never been quite clear about.
I've never been sure of my own personality.
INTERVIEWER: That's very refreshing.
That's a very refreshing thing to hear somebody say that.
Very. But can you fill us in on the barest outlines?
DAVID: I'm a collector.
Um, and I've always just seemed to collect personalities,
um, ideas. I have a hodge podge philosophy
which really is very minimal. Um, [indistinct] what?
INTERVIEWER: [indistinct] Do you believe in God?
DAVID: Um, I believe in an energy form.
I'm not-- I wouldn't put a--
I wouldn't like to put a name to it.
INTERVIEWER: Do you indulge in any form of worship?
DAVID: Um, uh, life.
I love life very much indeed.
DAVID: My strivings to have some kind of spiritual base
were really, really strong all my life,
and I think I tried to amalgamate
my own bedrock of spirituality.
I mean, I was a Buddhist on Tuesday,
and I was into Nietzsche by Friday.
INTERVIEWER: Some time flirting with Buddhism,
and spending some time in a Buddhist retreat.
DAVID: I mean, I felt at the time that I was, you know,
um, Buddha's answer to everything he wanted man to be,
but I'm-- the one thing that hung over from that time
was the feeling of impermanence and transience.
That was the one thing that really struck home
about everything that I was learning.
Nothing's gonna stay around very long.
I mean, you know, everything changes
...different rates.
Some seem to me sort of established for a bit,
but they're only moving at a slower rate than other things
and they're all inevitably sort of a change-over.
For me, there's always been a thread of merely,
um, a search.
Generally, I think the subject matters always come back
to this singular question of nearly every artist,
which is what's my relationship with the universe?
Whatever other form it takes that's basic,
I think that's probably the essential question
that all of us ask ourselves.
A lot of us probably on that last few minutes.
INTERVIEWER: What's Ziggy?
DAVID: Ziggy, I wanted-- I wanted to define
the archetype "Messiah Rockstar."
That's all I wanted to do,
and I used the trappings of Kabuki theater,
mime technique, and fringe New York music.
[LOVE ME DO SONG]
♪ Love, love me do ♪
♪ You know I love you ♪
♪ I'll always be true ♪
♪ So please ♪
AUDIENCE: ♪ Love me do ♪
DAVID: ♪ Loves to be loved ♪
DAVID: Ziggy was for me a very simplistic thing:
what it seemed to be, an alien rockstar,
but other people reread him
and contributed more information about Ziggy
than I'd put into him.
DAVID:
DAVID: You know, we've set ourselves up as such.
We want it all.
You know, we want all the adulation,
and people to read the lyrics, and read and everything
just to play the game.
DAVID:
DAVID: When I was really young, one of the mysteries,
the great mystery of rock, was that I hardly understood
a word of what they were singing about.
Fats Domino, I still don't know
one word of one lyric that he ever wrote.
I never understood his pronunciation.
And that made it even more mysterious, and wonderful,
and magic, you know?
That he was talking about something
that I couldn't even possibly start to understand,
and I wanted in.
I wanted to be in that place,
this alternate universe, you know?
And that was so much a part of the magic of music,
and the same with art.
I never really-- I could appreciate the Vermeer,
or Tintoretto, or Titian, or something like that,
but because it was symbolic and figurative,
it didn't-- I was never that impressed with virtuosity.
I was, you know, I understood that their technique
and the way they applied paint, and what they could do,
and how they could embrace light and all that,
I understood and realized the...
and I bowed in humbleness at their...
But it wasn't-- I mean, that's not what I wanted from it.
I wanted to use art.
I wanted to use art in a different way in my life.
I wanted a sense that...
all the nooks and crannies that we don't understand
about the way that we live through our day to day life,
and I wanted that shown to me, you know?
Not in great clarity, but some kind of physical manifestation
of these are the areas of life that are causing you grief,
or euphoria, and you don't really know why.
Why is it that you wake up one day,
and an oak tree, hit by the light in a certain way,
will produce these extraordinary feelings of glee,
and absolute enjoyment,
exhilaration at actually being alive.
Another day, you can wake up
and that same tree will seem like some
Caspar David Friedrich symbolic death, you know?
And it will be dark and negative and awful, you know?
And it's that sense of why those things happen?
Why aren't things the same every single day
and produce exactly the same feeling?
And art always does that to me.
INTERVIEWER: What are your hobbies?
DAVID: Well, where would you like to start?
Uh, I sculpt, paint, and write films.
Um, I make video television.
Not programs, but video television.
-INTERVIEWER: Of what? -Um, art things that I do.
Experimental video, and cinematography.
INTERVIEWER: With the art now that you create,
the sculpturings...
DAVID: Yeah, I have... you'll see.
INTERVIEWER: Is what... [indistinct]
DAVID: I play with video, yes. I flirt an awful lot.
I've asked again, over the last few years,
I've been identifying again with a force.
I don't know how I'm going to--
how it will end up for me,
but, um, I can't pinpoint it,
but I do have a very strong belief in...
in a force, and I don't know how it works.
What I mean is, there is something else other than us.
That's as near as I can get to it,
and it may even just be people on other planets
that I'm thinking about.
It may be God.
It may be-- I don't know what it is,
but there's a definite force that I feel.
INTERVIEWER: Almost like there's something else,
-that we're just a part of it. -DAVID: Yeah. Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: That's beyond us. That's my feeling as well.
There's always been, um, for me--
I guess for a lot of people-- a certain sense of you
that's other-worldly. Um, and of course that's...
[WARSZAWA SONG]
♪ Sula vie ♪
♪ Dilejo ♪
♪ Sula vie milejo ♪
♪ Mmm-omm... ♪
DAVID: Like anything useful,
it's all got to do with fear.
I think he's broken his arm, sir.
They wouldn't bother with it, Captain.
[QUICKSAND SONG]
♪ I'm closer to the Golden Dawn ♪
♪ Immersed in Crowley's uniform ♪
♪ Of imagery... ♪
INTERVIEWER: Ziggy was a disguise?
DAVID: He was a character that I created.
I wanted to make films...
♪ I'm living in a silent film... ♪
...and I transposed most of those ideas into music form.
INTERVIEWER: How long is it gonna take
before you're all David Bowie?
David: Oh never, you know.
I'd run off into something else, you know.
♪ I'm frightened by the total goal ♪
♪ Drawing to the ragged hole ♪
INTERVIEWER: What's "Changes" all about?
DAVID: Changes.
Someone putting themselves through
as much experimentation to, you know,
sort of treating oneself as a bit of an experiment.
I put myself in predicaments
to see how I'll cope with them a lot.
It's sort of trying to strengthen myself.
♪ I'm the twisted name in Goebbel's eyes ♪
♪ Living proof of Churchill's lies ♪
♪ I'm destiny ♪
♪ I'm torn between the light and dark ♪
♪ Where others see their targets ♪
♪ In divine symmetry ♪
I put myself in dangerous situations, which I did.
Put myself in any situation which I feel I can't cope with.
INTERVIEWER: Dangerous situations, such as what?
Can you explain that?
DAVID: Yeah. Areas where I have to be in,
sort of, social contact with people,
which I'm not very good at doing.
I put myself in--
INTERVIEWER: I don't quite know what you mean now.
DAVID: Well, I went to Los Angeles and I lived there
for a couple of years, which is a city I really detest.
-INTERVIEWER: Yeah. -DAVID: So, I went to
live there to see what would happen to my writing.
[NATURAL WOMAN SONG]
Aretha Franklin: ♪ When my soul was in the lost and found... ♪
INTERVIEWER: Since you've been in America,
you seem to have picked up
on a lot of the idioms and themes of American music,
and American culture. How has that happened?
DAVID: There's a fly floating around in my milk.
There's a foreign body in it, you see?
And it's getting a lot of milk.
That's kind of how I feel.
A foreign body, and I just-- I couldn't help but soak it up.
You know.
I hated it when I first came here.
I couldn't see any of it.
Look, a wax museum.
Hey, a bleedin' wax museum in the middle of a desert!
You'd think it would melt, wouldn't you?
DAVID: There's a good, old circle thing,
and it really is, it's uh,
it's the decadence that precedes the righteousness,
and the morality
of an extremely right wing art form,
which, in its right wing-ness is in fact very liberal
because the faster you can get rid of the right wings,
and by accelerating it, then you bring back [indistinct].
You've got to go through the dictatorship.
You've got to go through the right wing--
DAVID: Coveting the highest...
DAVID: Exactly.
Man Ray is suddenly getting very popular...
and it's-- I mean, I-- We-- I know, you know what's coming.
I mean, baby, what is coming. [indistinct]
Of course it is, yeah.
And we're going to live through it.
We're gonna be lucky enough [indistinct].
DAVID: This ain't rock and roll!
This is genocide!
[CRACKED ACTOR SONG]
♪ I've come on a few years ♪
♪ from my Hollywood Highs ♪
♪ The best of the last ♪
♪ The cleanest star' they ever had ♪
♪ I'm stiff on my legend ♪
♪ The films that I made ♪
♪ Forget that I'm fifty ♪
♪ 'Cause you just got paid ♪
♪ Crack, baby, crack ♪
♪ Show me you're real ♪
♪ Smack, baby, smack, is that all that you feel ♪
♪ Suck, baby, suck ♪
♪ Give me your head ♪
♪ Before you start professing ♪
♪ That you're knocking me dead... ♪
INTERVIEWER: You know, you haven't-- your accent,
your voice, your method of speech has not changed.
You've been away for two years.
Does that mean you've been locked away somewhere?
DAVID: Yes, I don't talk to anybody.
INTERVIEWER: But do people talk to you?
DAVID: I've heard it rumored, yes.
[CRACKED ACTOR SONG]
♪ But since he pinned you, baby ♪
♪ You're a porcupine ♪
♪ You sold me illusions for a sack full of checks ♪
♪ You've made a bad connection 'cause I just want your sex ♪
♪ Crack, baby, crack ♪
♪ Show me you're real ♪
♪ Smack, baby, smack, is that all that you feel ♪
♪ Suck, baby, suck ♪
♪ Give me your head ♪
♪ Before you start professing ♪
♪ That you're knocking me dead ♪
♪ Oh... ♪
♪ Oh stay ♪
♪ Don't you dare ♪
♪ Oh yeah... ♪
♪ Don't you dare ♪
♪ Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ♪
♪ Yeah... ♪
DICK: Some people thought--
There's a lady who said "I don't know if he'd be...
if I'd want to meet him. He would make me very nervous.
I have a feeling he's into black magic,
and that sort of thing."
And other people see you as just a very skillful performer
who changes from time to time,
from one thing to another.
DAVID: Yeah. Well, both of that is--
DICK: All of the above?
ROCK 'N' ROLL WITH ME (SONG)
♪ You always were the one that knew ♪
♪ They sold us for the likes of you ♪
♪ I never wanted anything ♪
♪ But new surroundings ♪
♪ A room to rent ♪
♪ while the lizards lay lying in the heat ♪
INTERVIEWER: What kind of childhood did you have?
DAVID: Oh, incredibly ordinary.
-INTERVIEWER: Ordinary? -DAVID: Yeah.
-INTERVIEWER: In what way? -DAVID: Well, I mean,
it was regular. I went to school, I ate.
DAVID: In suburbia, you're given the impression
that nothing culturally belongs to you.
That you are sort of in this wasteland,
and I think there's a passion for most people
who have an iota of curiosity
about them to escape and get out.
♪ When you rock 'n' roll with me ♪
♪ No one else I'd rather be ♪
♪ Nobody here can do it for me ♪
♪ I'm in tears again ♪
♪ When you rock 'n' roll with me ♪
DAVID: One of my siblings
meant so much to me in my early years,
and his name was Terry, and he was my half-brother,
my mother's son.
DAVID: Hey, hey, good evening, Buffalo.
It's nice to be here.
DAVID: He was living between our family and another family,
and the periods that I did see him,
it seemed to me that he had more curiosity about the world
than anybody I'd met.
And the first real, major event for me was
when he passed Jack Kerouac's On The Road on to me,
which really changed my life.
And he would also introduce me to people like John Coltrane,
which was way above my head,
but I wanted to read what he read,
and I wanted to listen to what he listened to,
as one does with an older brother.
♪ When you rock 'n' roll with me ♪
♪ No one else I'd rather be ♪
♪ Nobody here can do it for me... ♪
DAVID: I think Terry probably gave me a great--
the greatest serviceable education
I could ever have had.
I mean, he just introduced me to the outside things,
kinds of books, and kinds of music
and attitudes that just weren't
the currency in the area that I grew up.
And then he would go away for long periods,
and one period he went away and joined the RAF.
When he came back, he had very evident signs of schizophrenia,
and he stayed in hospital for the rest of his life.
[ROCK 'N' ROLL WITH ME SONG]
♪ When you rock 'n' roll with me ♪
♪ No one else I'd rather be ♪
♪ Nobody here can do it for me... ♪
DAVID: I think it made me worry about my own disposition,
and whether I just had eccentric ideas,
or whether I was heading somewhere else.
♪ When you rock 'n' roll, rock 'n' roll with me ♪
♪ No one else I'd rather, I'd rather be ♪
♪ Nobody down here can do it for me ♪
♪ I'm in tears ♪
♪ When you rock 'n' roll with me... ♪
♪ Oh yeah ♪
♪ Rock 'n' roll with me ♪
♪ Oh-hoo yeah. ♪
INTERVIEWER: I understand that you have a fear
because there was mental illness in your family,
that you have a fear of mental illness. Is that true?
DAVID: Um, no, I developed a system against it.
I think that probably became part of the therapy of art,
and I was fortunate enough to be able to
express any visions that I had in my head.
-INTERVIEWER: Yeah. -DAVID: Very outwardly.
DAVID: Gradually learning to do without sleep.
DAVID: It's a labyrinthine existence that we live,
and so it makes sense for me to put together
elements in a song which
wouldn't naturally be good bedfellows.
I guess I'm trying to articulate...
those mysterious corners of the mind
where there exist grains of truth
that we don't often touch on,
because we don't have the words to capture them.
So, we'll write on three or four different subject matters,
and then integrate them together by cutting them up.
What I've used it for more than anything else
is igniting anything that might be in my imagination.
I've tried doing it with diaries and things,
and I was finding out amazing things about me
and what I'd done and where I was going.
A lot of the things I had done,
it seemed that it would predict things about the future
and tell me a lot about the past.
I suppose it's a very Western tarot. I don't know.
Obviously, one is trying to always
reevaluate one's personality,
and understand why one works.
I think a lot of artists deal with loneliness and solitude.
An artist does tend to examine the world
through his relationship to it,
and so that produces
a very introverted looking lot of work.
I don't feel lonely. I apply that to my work.
I sense a feeling of loneliness from my work when I look at it,
but I don't feel like a solitary person myself,
but it seems to show up in my work,
and it's like taking a photograph
and then developing the negative
and seeing another person standing behind you.
♪ Who will love Aladdin Sane ♪
♪ Battle cries and champagne just in time for sunrise ♪
♪ Who will love Aladdin Sane ♪
♪ Motor sensational ♪
♪ Paris or maybe hell ♪
♪ I'm waiting ♪
♪ Clutches of sad remains ♪
♪ Waits for Aladdin Sane You'll make it ♪
♪ Who will love Aladdin Sane ♪
♪ Millions weep a fountain, just in case of sunrise... ♪
INTERVIEWER: With your background,
why were you intrigued by all this?
DAVID: Um, it was... I mean,
it filled a vast expanse of my imagination.
I was always pretty imaginative.
And the imagination can dry up in
wherever you're living in England, often.
I mean, if there's nothing to keep it going.
It just supplied a need in me.
American became a myth-land for me.
DAVID: We're not stopped. Is there anything behind us?
INTERVIEWER: Let's go with him now live,
by satellite,
to beautiful downtown Burbank in Los Angeles.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Is it true that you're gonna be
teaming up with...
Every avenue.
It's very calm, and it's a kind of a superficial calmness
that they've developed to underplay the fact that it's--
there's a lot of high pressure here,
as it's a very big entertainment industry area.
And you get this feeling of unease with everybody.
It's a very big entertainment area.
DAVID: The first time that it really
came home to me what a strange...
About the churches designed by an architect...
DAVID: Arthur, would you please slow down?
INTERVIEWER: We're bouncing backwards and forwards
on the satellite at the moment.
I mean, our sound is bouncing around.
Yes, I can see it.
It'll be all right in a minute.
INTERVIEWER: Are you there, David?
Bedroom in the sky.
INTERVIEWER: Are you there, Mr. David Bowie?
DAVID: I think that I felt often,
ever since I was a teenager,
um, so adrift, and so not part of everyone I saw.
There's so many dark secrets
about my family in the cupboard
that it kind of made me feel
very much on the outside of everything,
and because of that, I felt there was no basis to my life,
like everybody else seemed to have.
Which of course is ridiculous.
Probably, I would do things to prove that
I had some emotional substance...
when in fact I didn't.
DAVID: Thematically, I've always dealt with isolation
in everything I've written, I think.
INTERVIEWER: If you're interested in isolation,
is it because you think that a person in an isolated state
feel greater emotions than they do
when they're surrounded by people and things?
DAVID: I think if he is in isolation,
instead of receiving the whole world as his home,
he tends to create a micro-world inside himself.
Um, and it's that peculiar part of the human mind
that fascinates me about the small universes
that can be created inside the mind.
Some of them fairly schizophrenic
and quite off the wall.
It feels now that I don't come from anywhere,
but I was born in Brixton.
INTERVIEWER : When were you born? What year?
DAVID: 1947. January the eighth.
Makes me a Capricorn with an Aquarius ascendant
and a Leo descendant.
INTERVIEWER: How much now is left of the lad
from Brixton, do you think?
DAVID: Not very much, I would think.
I know, you know.
I never got-- I never became who I should have been.
I've spent an awful lot of my life
actually looking for myself, you know?
And understanding what it was that I-why-what I existed for.
What was it that really made me happy in life?
And who exactly, or was--
Who are the parts of myself I was trying to hide from?
I think a lot of us have huge senses of denial
about who we are and where we exist in the world
I really wanted to sort of, you know,
be very emotionally involved with people.
I didn't know how to do it.
You know, my parents were like that,
and I guess you kind of, as they say,
they pass on a lot of faults.
DICK: What do your parents do for a living?
My father's dead, and my mother has a small flat,
and I think she's got a day job.
DICK: Does she have trouble explaining you to the neighbors
who say, "Are you any relation to that..."
DAVID: I think she pretends I'm not hers.
Nah, she's uh, she doesn't talk much.
You know, she doesn't, um, I don't think we really--
We were never that close particularly.
We have an understanding.
DICK: Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: Was it a happy marriage?
Not necessarily terribly loving or anything,
in terms of no real physical affection,
or even they didn't really articulate
any love for each other.
There's an awful lot of emotional/spiritual mutilation
goes on in my family.
INTERVIEWER: Did you like any of the traditional people
that you're supposed to like?
Like, did you like Winnie the Pooh?
DAVID: No. No.
INTERVIEWER: Rupert Bear?
DAVID: No. No I didn't. I didn't like--
INTERVIEWER: Did you have a teddy bear?
DAVID: No, I didn't. I don't think...
I can't remember having anything like that at all.
No, I never liked, um, children's things very much.
INTERVIEWER: You know, since you've been away,
or quite recently, the newspapers
having been having a bit of a bash at your mother?
And saying that she's a bit tearful from time to time.
and that she's suffered a certain amount of anguish,
and that she doesn't hear from you an awful lot.
Is that eyewash or is it real?
DAVID: There's some kind of traumatism
often goes on in our childhoods I think.
I think, that are...
Makes us crave some kind of strange affection, you know?
It's sort of an...
Often you'll find that the person
who craves a lot of affection
actually isn't terribly good at giving it.
INTERVIEWER: Does that mean you have to separate yourself
quite a lot from, say, falling in love
and getting very involved with a person?
Um, oh no, I think, no.
I think quite the reverse.
INTERVIEWER: But, love, falling in love,
is different from then going on to love that person.
Yes, it is. Yes.
And once you've loved somebody a lot,
it means that you've got to share your life with them.
-That's what I really-- -DAVID: No, I don't think so.
I think you can love somebody from afar.
But if you then decided not to love them from afar,
you as an artist would have to give up
quite a lot of your time to them.
Yes, and I can't do that.
INTERVIEWER: That's what I was wondering,
whether you did-- whether you did that.
DAVID: No, no, no, love can't get quite in my way,
because I feel-- I shelter myself from it incredibly.
Interviewer: Do you feel removed from the body and the feel
that you create on the planet?
DAVID: Until I'm performing or writing
I mainly feel pretty much of an empty vessel.
INTERVIEWER: When you're performing and writing,
you're fulfilled?
DAVID: I don't particularly feel...
♪ Ground Control to Major Tom ♪
♪ Take your protein pills and put your helmet on ♪
♪ Ground Control to Major Tom ♪
♪ Commencing countdown, engines on ♪
♪ Check ignition ♪
♪ And may God's love be with you ♪
♪ This is Ground Control to Major Tom ♪
♪ You've really made the grade ♪
♪ And the papers want to know ♪
♪ Whose shirts you wear ♪
♪ Now it's time to leave the capsule ♪
♪ If you dare ♪
♪ This is Major Tom to Ground Control ♪
♪ I'm stepping through the door ♪
♪ And I'm floating in a most peculiar way ♪
♪ And the stars look very different today ♪
♪ For here ♪
♪ Am I sitting in my tin can ♪
♪ Far above the world ♪
♪ Planet Earth is blue ♪
♪ And there's nothing I can do ♪
DAVID: Well, an awful lot of changes
with my musical career
were challenges to myself.
I have to feel that I'm stepping on new ground,
that the ice beneath my feet is very thin.
Any second, I could crack it
and just plunge through and drown.
I got to a point in Los Angeles
where I got very tired with my method of writing,
and I wanted to invent a new musical language.
I knew I had to get to an environment
that was totally different to Los Angeles.
So I thought of the most arduous city
that I could think of, and it was West Berlin.
They don't give an FA about who you are in Berlin.
The trappings of rock and roll don't mean anything to them.
So, I could walk around, buy me own food,
and just lease a small apartment,
which I did above an automobile spare parts shop.
I didn't have the necessary verbal equipment
to describe what I was seeing,
and that's where I needed assistance.
So, I contacted Brian Eno,
who is definitely one of the keenest brains
of modern music, and I said,
"Look, Brian, I need to know some new processes,
"and new methods of writing.
Please help me, otherwise I'm packing it in."
We started working on a series
of processes and methods of writing in the studio in Berlin
to invent, a different kind of linguistics to work with.
Most of the things that I do these days,
I go in with very little preparation.
There's no governor, no controller.
Every track is written with a different process,
from spontaneous singing,
I didn't know what I was gonna sing,
or how I was gonna sing it,
and I just stood in front of the mic,
right down to fragmented, pre-thought,
analyzed and processed writings of Burroughs' school.
It probably touches areas of emotion
that aren't normally dwelt upon
because they're arrived at other than
by the regular channels of emotive thought.
[SOUND AND VISION SONG]
♪ Blue, blue, electric blue ♪
♪ That's the color of my living room ♪
♪ Where I will live ♪
♪ Blue, blue ♪
♪ Pale blinds drawn all day ♪
♪ Nothing to read and nothing to say ♪
♪ Blue, blue Pale blinds ♪
♪ I will dream of other lands ♪
♪ Waiting for the gift of sound and vision ♪
DAVID: Most of the things that I do these days
are on the occasion of the studio.
I go in with very little preparation,
just throw ideas out,
and you might make little experiments sort of say,
look here's 50 seconds.
play 10 notes on that 50 seconds
and don't repeat the same note twice.
Now, that sounds like an awful easy thing to do.
Well, it is.
See, you must understand,
I mean, it sounds incredibly indulgent,
and indeed it is because what I'm trying to do
is mold the traditional methods of rock and roll...
with newer processes.
Trying to find a new form of language.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think you have influence
on their thinking, though?
DAVID: No.
And that's what I'm trying to do with the new music,
is find a new language which doesn't-- it isn't that--
doesn't have that kind of image influence.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think people will understand that language?
DAVID: Yes.
Because I think people, especially in the city context,
think in fragments.
The city person will see a milk advert on the street,
and be thinking "Milk, what's gonna--
"what are we gonna have for dinner?
"Boy getting knocked down by a bus,
crashed against a wall..." that kind of thing.
So, he's thinking in terms of,
maybe 1,000 different images at any given time.
And the language that Brian and I are sort of producing
is a language that can relate to that way of thinking.
DAVID: We live within this manifested idea
of what should be form,
and what we try and keep out of our existence is chaos,
which is a very real part of our lives,
and our refusal to accept chaos
as being integral to our existence,
I think, has been one of the greatest mistakes
as a civilization that we've made.
DAVID: My work as an artist
has always been to do with transition.
The nature and study of change
in our particular era is most important
because never in our history
has there been such a rapid curve of change
since the industrial revolution.
I'm a fairly good social observer,
and I think that I encapsulate areas
every, maybe every year or so,
I tried to stamp that down somewhere,
what that year is all about.
Rather than what it was all about,
or what it's going to be.
It's very much trying to capture
the quintessence of that year.
INTERVIEWER: I notice that the music now
is more-- more daring,
more adventurous, more fractured.
Is there a danger that by following your instinct,
your aesthetic instincts,
if you like, your artistic instinct,
that you will jeopardize that?
You know, the money and the good life and all--
No shit, Sherlock.
Yes, I think I-- Yes, I think I rather sort of hit that one
in the head at the moment.
Um, and it's quite a relief, really.
I feel a lot more, um, free than what I do.
I just needed, it just needed a positive decision
to only do what I want to do,
and not do things for the sake of what...
either David Bowie or whoever I was playing last time,
Thin White Duke or something, was expected to do.
DAVID: I went naked in Berlin.
I really did try and strip down my life
to what I believed to be absolute basic essentials
so I could build up again
everything that I thought that I'd lost, you know?
I guess I was-- what I was really doing
was doing that on an emotional and spiritual level,
but you manifest it physically.
The surprising thing is, is that we came up--
We thought we were just going to be into a process
of discovery and experiment
and had some pretty wishy-washy stuff come out of it,
but what did come out of it was a pretty good statement
of some esoteric nature.
It was a bit hard to put one's finger
on exactly what the information was,
but it was vital, and it was interesting,
and I think that's successful music.
[HEROES SONG]
♪ I, I will be king ♪
♪ And you, you will be my queen ♪
♪ Though nothing can keep us together ♪
♪ We can beat them, forever and ever ♪
♪ We could be heroes just for one day ♪
♪ You, you can be me ♪
♪ And I, I'll drink all the time ♪
♪ 'Cause we're lovers, and that is the fact ♪
♪ Yes we're lovers, and that is that ♪
♪ Though nothing will keep us together ♪
♪ We can beat them forever and ever ♪
♪ And we can be heroes just for one day ♪
♪ I, well I wish I could swim ♪
♪ Like dolphins, like dolphins can swim ♪
♪ Though nothing, can drive them away ♪
♪ We can beat them forever and ever ♪
♪ Oh, we can be heroes just for one day ♪
♪ What you say? ♪
♪ I, I can remember ♪
BAND: ♪ I remember ♪
DAVID: ♪ Standing by the wall ♪
BAND: ♪ By the wall ♪
DAVID: ♪ And the guns shot above our heads ♪
BAND:♪ Over our heads ♪
DAVID: ♪ And we kissed as though nothing could fall ♪
BAND: ♪ Nothing could fall ♪
DAVID: ♪ And nothing and no one will help us ♪
♪ Maybe we're lying ♪
♪ Then you better not stay ♪
♪ We can be safer just for one day ♪
♪ Oh-oh-oh-oh ♪
♪ We can be heroes ♪
♪ Oh-oh-oh-oh ♪
♪ Just for one day ♪
♪ Oh-oh-oh-oh ♪
♪ Just for one day. ♪
REPORTER: Today, David Bowie is 33 years old.
He has recorded 17 rock albums,
produced a gallery full of paintings,
acted in two feature films,
and is the only rock star
ever to act in a play on Broadway.
Bowie never seems to stand still.
When he no longer feels challenged
by one art form,
he moves on to the next, and the next, and the next.
It's as if David Bowie learned to run
before he learned to walk.
[DJ SONG]
♪ I'm home ♪
♪ Lost my job... ♪
DAVID: You know, I've got a grasshopper sort of mind,
and I can't resist bringing things
to a conclusion like saying, "Well that's a piece in itself,
and now I move on to something else."
INTERVIEWER: You described yourself as a generalist.
-Is that-- -DAVID: Yeah.
That's a freedom-- giving umbrella.
It gives me a chance
to do anything I want successfully
or unsuccessfully, without being tied down.
I want-- I'm a generalist,
is really sort of my cliche way describing myself.
DAVID: David Bowie. Rank and file.
33 years old.
Generalist.
ANNOUNCER: Unlike most rock stars
who stick to a successful formula
when they get it, Bowie, when he does,
deliberately changes direction, and puts on yet another face.
♪ Believing me ♪
DAVID: I really sort of go in just pure, barbaric impetus.
I do get fired up for something
and it's not all cerebral at all, by any means.
A lot of it is pure instinct,
and knowing that I've found something
that I haven't found before.
(slurring speech) Sometimes I think my head is so big
because it is so full of themes.
♪ I am a D.J., I am what I play ♪
♪ Can't turn around no ♪
♪ Can't turn around, no, oh, ooh ♪
♪ I am a D.J. I am what I say ♪
♪ Can't turn around no, can't turn around, no, oh no ♪
♪ I am a D.J., I am what I play ♪
♪ I've got believers ♪
♪ Believing me, oh... ♪
INTERVIEWER: What are you gonna do now?
Are you going back home to bed?
DAVID: Yes. Well, I don't know.
A bit in the mood to probably do a little writing
or painting or something.
INTERVIEWER: You're painting in large canvases?
Or small canvases? Or drawings?
DAVID: Yes. Quire large, acrylics.
I'm doing a lot of sculptures as well.
A sort of polythene and essential functional things.
INTERVIEWER: Why are you creative, David?
DAVID: I think it has something to do
with wanting to find the place where I can kind of set sail
and know that I won't really fall off the edge of the world
when I get to the end of the sea.
I find it an intoxicating parallel
to my perceived reality.
I'm not sure that I'm manifesting ideas
when I do my work.
It's just this inexhaustible supply
of extracurricular thoughts
that I have that don't actually apply
to the survival of life,
and I'm not quite sure what to do with them.
♪ He used to be my boss and now he is a puppet dancer ♪
♪ I am the D.J., and I've got believers ♪
♪ I got believers ♪
♪ I got believers, believing me... ♪
DAVID: So rather than be pinned down,
my momentum was to hit and run very fast.
Once I'd done something,
and said it, drop it and move on.
[ASHES TO ASHES SONG]
DAVID: I feel quite at home in just about anywhere now,
on a temporary basis.
INTERVIEWER: Where do you spend most of your time?
DAVID: Again, what is "most of one's time"?
Over the last year, it's been London,
New York, South Pacific, Australia, Africa...
The nature of my life
is one of an old-fashioned beatnik traveler,
and more than anything else,
I spend very little time in musical circles.
I spend more time discovering the social life
of rather obscure places.
♪ "I'm happy, hope you're happy too ♪
♪ I've loved all I've needed, love ♪
a♪ Sordid details following" ♪
♪ The shrieking of nothing is killing, just ♪
♪ Pictures of Jap girls in synthesis and I ♪
♪ Ain't got no money and I ain't got no hair ♪
♪ But I'm hoping to kick, but the planet it's glowing ♪
♪ Ashes to ash, funk to funky ♪
♪ We know Major Tom's a junkie ♪
♪ Strung out in heaven's high ♪
♪ Hitting an all-time low... ♪
MAN: This is your promised land is it not?
Roof, food, care, protection.
DAVID: Oh, right, Mr. Treves.
MAN: I'll bet you don't know what to call this.
DAVID: No, sir. I don't.
MAN: You call it... home.
Never had a home before.
MAN: You have one now.
Say it, John.
-Home. -Home?
MAN: No, no. I mean really say it.
"I have a home.
This is my--" Come on.
DAVID: I have a home.
This is my home.
I have a home.
I have, for as long as I like.
MAN: That is what home is.
DAVID: I had always thought
that by this stage I would be settled down somewhere
with a house and grounds and everything,
but I never got to doing that.
Never-- I've never bought a house,
and I still have no intention to buy...
because with me,
the way I live is very much also part of the...
what produces my work,
so I have to keep examining my life
to make sure that I am in constant change,
and not getting too bloated with philosophic opulence.
Keep sort of throwing bits and pieces away.
And by-- to change countries is one way of doing that.
I'm not quite sure where to go now.
Um, the East beckons me.
I'm a bit scared of moving over there, you know?
INTERVIEWER: Japan?
DAVID: Yes, because I fall in love so much
with the lifestyle that I'll get very Zen about it.
[ALL THE YOUNG DUDES SONG BEING VOCALIZED]
JAPANESE INTERVIEWER: Please give us your special message
to the audience of our program, "Young Oh! Oh!"
Look at the camera, please.
DAVID: Uh, don't waste any day. Don't waste a minute.
INTERVIEWER: Yes.
[indistinct] Mr. David Bowie.
Thank you again.
[SPEAKS JAPANESE BRIEFLY]
DAVID: I hope that none of us are kind of static
throughout our lives.
I mean, I guess one has a formed personality
from quite an early age,
but it is tempered and subject to change.
I mean, we all to a certain extent
create our lives and create our culture daily,
as we live that 24 hours.
We'll choose a tie, or a haircut, or a chair,
not just because it's functional,
but for most of us
because it actually says something about us.
I still, you know, am sort of getting somewhere
that I quite like, but I'm still not.
We'll find out eventually, won't we?
I might now be cut out for all this, really,
at the end.
INTERVIEWER: Why did you change so often?
I mean, what was the need for it?
Was it just a gimmick?
DAVID: Being a Capricorn.
I didn't want to expose myself to the public,
so I developed a series of characters.
So, behind that all the time was a real David Bowie?
At times, yes.
I lost control a couple of times.
So you're not-- This is really you.
This is not you just still sort of playing the role of...
One wonders.
I think that it's not at all mystifying
why you change your appearance as often as you do,
to my view by the way,
because I think you've used yourself as a canvas.
-Yes, very much so. -Is that right?
DAVID: Yes, very much so.
Um, I never wanted to appear as myself onstage ever,
at any time, until recently.
Were you hiding yourself from us by doing that?
DAVID: Partly, but I was enjoying it very much.
-And, you paint now? -Yes.
But your paintings, you're not willing
to let us see yet?
DAVID: Uh, no.
I've been offered two or three showings,
but I've turned--
I've accepted two of them, and then I broke my word
and said I wouldn't show them.
I haven't yet bucked up the courage.
INTERVIEWER: Why not? What do you fear?
DAVID: Well, I know I'm a good writer.
I'm not sure about putting my paintings.
They're very personal to me, as well.
Um, they're all portraits,
and they're portraits of people in isolation.
Most of the paintings are Germans or Turks
who live in Berlin,
and they're either from East Berlin,
and who are now living in West Berlin,
and knowing their families
are on the other side of the wall.
And so, I tried to capture a lot of that isolation
and I put a lot of myself into the paintings as well.
They're very much part of me.
DICK: Well, I think the question is what--
you know, what you want to be for yourself and your life.
DAVID: I don't know whether that's important anymore.
I mean, what I want to do is just work well.
When I'm working well, I like my writing.
At the moment, especially.
More than at any other time, I think.
I mean, I was getting so bored with what I was writing.
I just, I felt inadequate, I thought my writing
was becoming monotonous.
I didn't take the kinds of chances
I was taking at one time.
I thought if I'm going to end up like,
um, a lot of other rock and roll celebrities,
inasmuch that I'm going to be trying
to retain the safe position, you know?
And that's not what I started out wanting to do.
DICK: But is it important to you to have a mass audience?
Do you want a lot of people to--
DAVID: No. No.
I want to work well.
I want to-- I just have to work well.
I think it's an heroic act to take,
um-- to be able to obtain enthusiasm
and joy from the actual process of living from day to day.
INTERVIEWER: [SPEAKING JAPANESE]
DAVID: Yes, very much.
I try. And it is, it is--
I think it takes practice to,
and concentration, and exercise to enjoy it.
This is very easy to fall into the trap of looking
for one's dreams and always thinking of a future moment
when everything will be better.
And if the process is not enjoyed,
the dreams will never come to anything.
And by enjoying the process,
you are creating a dream come true.
I think I have an abundantly healthy curiosity about life.
About life around me, specifically.
And how, how we put ourselves together culturally,
and I think it's served me well as an artist,
in as much as I'm really inquiring continually
into how things are made and why we make them,
and the significance or meanings behind things.
I'd be really scared of feeling that I'd got somewhere,
because for me, art is about searching,
and if you come to a place
where you think you've made a discovery,
I think that really is...
God, that would be really demoralizing.
I think the search is the thing.
♪ And you want to believe ♪
♪ And we want to believe ♪
♪ And we want to live ♪
♪ Oh, we want to live ♪
♪ We want to live ♪
♪ I want to live ♪
♪ Live ♪
[SINGING NOT AUDIBLE]
♪ Ain't that just like me. ♪
DAVID: There's a gradual shift when you reach mid 30s.
Uh, I think that there's a period
where you have to decide not to try
and grasp frantically for the feelings of desperation
and anger that you have when you're in your mid 20s.
And if you can relax into the idea that being mid 30s
is quite a nice place to be
with an amount of experience behind you,
I think the perspective changes.
INTERVIEWER: You said once that there's
so many shells around you
that you don't know what the p... looks like anymore.
DAVID: Yeah, well I've gone through that.
I'm pretty aware of what I'm like.
-INTERVIEWER: Really? -DAVID: Yeah, yeah.
I feel pretty-pretty happy about my own relationship
to the world, and...
We've got to be positive about our days on this planet.
INTERVIEWER: I never realized you were such an optimist.
DAVID: Well, I never was particularly.
INTERVIEWER: You're more romantic
than people give you credit for.
DAVID: I think I'm probably a lot more emotional
than people would think that I was.
I am emotionally very responsive to life and people.
I just wanted to come in touch with a common factor
because I feel a need at the moment to...
be part of a society again,
and having traveled an awful lot,
feel more and more part of everything.
And I wish to express that feeling.
I don't want to seem as though I'm detached and cold
because I'm not.
INTERVIEWER: You seem very sure of yourself,
and very, sort of content, and...
You seem at ease with yourself.
DAVID: I'm at ease with myself, yeah.
INTERVIEWER: You've always been so good
at being convincing, you know?
-Whatever it was at the time. -DAVID: Yeah. I see.
INTERVIEWER: I mean, is it possible that this
-is just another role? -DAVID: I see what's going on.
I believe that there is a thread
of meaning running through my life at the moment,
that I have no wish at the moment to break,
and I feel it's leading
somewhere fulfilling and positive.
And if I feel that way, then I make every effort
to make that part of my music now.
It's the ultimate swing of the pendulum.
When things reach a point to one extreme,
there will be a natural gravitation
back to a point,
which is the antithesis of that one.
So, you've got a musical vocabulary,
which is high-tech, and icy.
There's gonna be sooner or later a swing back to,
well, what is the other side of that coin?
MAN: Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. David Bowie.
[MODERN LOVE SONG]
DAVID: I'd like to, um, start off the 80s
in a positive, optimistic fashion.
I'll be undertaking, a world tour,
sometime around the middle of the year,
and it'll take me through to the autumn at least.
And he's back. David Bowie,
launching his first new album in three years,
preparing for his first British tour in five years,
and telling Newsnight's Robin Denselow
about his new and more emotional music style.
DAVID: I'm trying to write in a more obvious
and positive manner.
I've not gone quite into a corner
with experimentation of sound.
I'm not quite so concerned with cut-up exercise,
or using juxtaposition of lyrics, or whatever.
I'd like to do something positive.
Something that helps people, to use a cliche.
DAVID: This is probably the simplest music
I've ever done.
INTERVIEWER: What do you mean simple?
DAVID: It makes very warm,
understandable musical statements.
It has a warm response.
I hope that it's the most emotionally uplifting music
I've made in a long time.
It's very positive.
INTERVIEWER: Is that how you're feeling?
DAVID: Relatively. Oh yeah.
I'm very positive.
♪ Never gonna fall for ♪
♪ Modern love ♪
♪ Walks beside me ♪
♪ Modern love ♪
♪ Walks on by ♪
♪ Modern love ♪
♪ Gets me to the church on time ♪
REPORTER: British fans are overwhelming
the post office with more than four times
as many ticket requests as seats available.
This is the biggest demand ever.
BOY: We waited hours and hours to get tickets.
INTERVIEWER: Big Bowie fan?
MAN: Yeah, that's me.
WOMAN: He's totally evolved.
He knows what his fans want,
and that's what he's delivering now.
I love David Bowie!
REPORTER: Fans have been waiting a day and a half
in the stadium parking lot.
They open the gates at 5pm.
We want Bowie!
♪ Modern love ♪
EMCEE : Ladies and gentlemen...
David Bowie and his band!
[LET'S DANCE SONG]
MAN: What is it about David Bowie
that excites you so much?
-His style. -Yeah?
I like his makeup.
MAN: You like his makeup?
WOMAN: I like his music.
BAND: ♪ Let's dance ♪
DAVID: ♪ Put on your red shoes and dance the blues ♪
BAND: ♪ Let's dance ♪
DAVID: ♪ To the song they're playin' on the radio ♪
BAND: ♪ Let's sway ♪
DAVID: ♪ While color lights up your face ♪
BAND: ♪ Let's sway ♪
DAVID: ♪ Sway through the crowd to an empty space ♪
♪ If you say run I'll run with you ♪
♪ And if you say hide ♪
♪ We'll hide ♪
♪ Because my love for you ♪
♪ Would break my heart in two ♪
♪ If you should fall into my arms ♪
♪ Trembling like a flower ♪
BAND: ♪ Let's dance ♪
DAVID: ♪ Put on your red shoes and dance the blues ♪
BAND: ♪ Let's dance ♪
DAVID: ♪ Under the moonlight ♪
♪ This serious moonlight ♪
BAND: ♪ Let's sway ♪
♪ Let's sway ♪
♪ Let's dance ♪
DAVID: ♪ Let's dance, let's dance ♪
♪ Let's dance, Let's dance. ♪
AUDIENCE: Bowie!
Bowie! Bowie!
INTERVIEWER: Do you think they phenomenal success
of the tour marks the rebirth of Bowie fever?
DAVID: No, I don't think that.
But I think it's just a Bowie acceptance now,
which is quite gratifying after all these years.
Didn't think I'd ever hear myself saying this,
but it's like the audience
and myself are just, like, together.
It's trying to come back
to being a person again in terms--
in the eyes of the audience,
and it certainly has no pretensions
to be a serious,
heavy statement-filled show, but I mean,
it's exactly what I want it to be.
INTERVIEWER: What do you most enjoy doing?
DAVID: In life, at the moment?
Waking up and feeling as though I've got a future.
I keep remembering that there is a tomorrow,
when that never really occurred to me before,
that there was a tomorrow.
Tomorrow was really, "This is it.
"This is now, this is important.
"Everything else is crazy, and static,
"and it means nothing, or everything's impermanent,
therefore I will just live for the second."
And one has to start taking very positive stands on things.
When you feel comfortable with yourself,
you can no longer write.
That seems to be the writer's great problem.
As I get more comfortable, I obviously have the feeling
that it's not so much that is my writing as good,
or as potent as it used to be, but do I need to write anymore?
MAN: His new album seems to be, to me, a step sideways.
INTERVIEWER: Why do you describe it
that-- in that way?
MAN: Because I think he's not doing
anything particularly new,
and I suspect that for the first time ever,
the fans are up there with him and he's not ahead of the game.
He seems to me to have become something rather old fashioned,
which is to say a superstar.
If you've gone mainstream, there's only one way to do it,
and that's sell out three days a year.
MAN 2: Really do it.
MAN: Yeah, yeah.
He's done it in one big deal, hasn't he?
INTERVIEWER: This is the last stop
on what's been a pretty extensive tour for you.
DAVID: Uh, yeah, I'm not actually finishing in Auckland.
I'm going over now
to Singapore, Hong Kong, and Bangkok.
♪ I've nothing much to offer ♪
♪ There's nothing much to take ♪
♪ I'm an absolute beginner ♪
♪ But I'm absolutely sane ♪
I'm not quite so stricken with the idea
of making a point.
I'm not quite sure that any point
that I have to make isn't being made quite as well
by other people.
Um, and that maybe the point,
my most important point,
is that I can entertain very well,
and I think I'm no longer finding it uncomfortable
to reach that conclusion.
That I now find I'm very comfortable
being an actor, an entertainer,
without too much all-encompassing stuff.
♪ Time takes a cigarette ♪
♪ Puts it in your mouth ♪
♪ You pull on your finger ♪
♪ Then another finger then your cigarette ♪
♪ The wall-to-wall is calling ♪
♪ It lingers, but still you forget ♪
♪ Ohhh ♪
♪ You're a rock and roll suicide ♪
♪ You're too young to lose it ♪
♪ But you're too old to lose it ♪
♪ And the clocks waits so patiently on your song ♪
♪ Well, you walk past a cafe ♪
♪ But you can't eat when you've lived too long... ♪
MAN: Pepsi continues to innovate,
by capturing what's new,
what's contemporary, and what's hot.
The Glass Spider Tour will be all of that.
♪ Now the Chev brakes are snarling ♪
♪ As you stumble across the road ♪
INTERVIEWER: You always have that segment of people
who are with you from the start
and if you know Bowie, you know he's sold out.
DAVID: I don't begrudge any artist for getting an audience.
I'm sorry, I never found that poverty meant purity.
INTERVIEWER: For a guy who doesn't like
to play it safe, though, as the audience gets larger,
it must be harder to take those chances.
♪ Oh no, love, you're not alone ♪
♪ You're watching yourself but you're too unfair ♪
♪ You got your head all tangled up ♪
♪ But if I could only make you care ♪
Here I was, making lots of money,
performing to these huge audiences,
and I thought that's it, you know?
I've come to the vacuum of my life.
♪ No matter when or where you've seen ♪
♪ All the knives seem to lacerate your brain ♪
♪ I've had my share now I'll help you with the pain ♪
♪ You're not alone ♪
♪ Just turn on with me and you're not alone ♪
♪ Gimme your hands cause you're wonderful ♪
♪ I said ♪
♪ Gimme your hands cause you're wonderful ♪
♪ Cause you... Gimmie your hands ♪
♪ Cause you're wonderful ♪
♪ Gimme your hands 'cause you're wonderful ♪
♪ Gimme your hands ♪
♪ 'Cause you're wonderful ♪
I'm a young man.
Do you understand?
I'm a young man.
♪ 'Cause you're wonderful. ♪
Thank you very much. Bye bye, we love you.
DAVID: Even though it was enormously successful,
there was no growth going on at all.
They were very hard years to get through
to find any sense of purpose.
I wasn't allowing myself
the service of being who I really am as an artist.
I'd given myself dreadful parameters
in confining myself to merely what I presumed people wanted.
I never wanted to do this.
I never wanted to be out there pleasing people.
I wanted to be really stubborn
and have people like what I like.
Not give them what they like.
It's very, very easy to become work-obsessed
for the reason of not having to look at oneself.
I think over the last few years,
I'm understanding
a very important thing in my life,
which is that I really have to come back
to what my life is about.
That my life is not about the work that I do.
My work is not me.
I am distinctly one entity that needs looking at.
When I first looked,
I just didn't understand that person,
because I'd never given myself the time,
nor the incentive
to want to really have a look at myself, deeply.
I think the first intrusion into one's own inner conflicts
is not the most pleasant of experiences.
But working through them
can really be one of the greatest adventures
of one's life,
and it takes a certain amount of bravado,
and need, and a realization
that you're missing out on your own life.
You are probably creating hazards
and disturbing experiences for others around you.
And the house must be put right.
INTERVIEWER: Do you have any room in your life
for any kind of real relationship like that?
DAVID: More room than I've ever had before.
INTERVIEWER: You've said that being in love,
you thought was like a disease.
DAVID: Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: Horrible, and it bred jealousy, and--
DAVID: I think I've-- I think I've--
I think I've grown to feel a distaste for that statement.
Then I met Iman,
and it was smack, right from the first night.
That was it. It was over.
It was incredible.
My life suddenly became rose-tinged.
[WORD ON A WING SONG]
♪ In this age of grand illusion ♪
♪ You walked into my life ♪
♪ Out of my dreams ♪
♪ I don't need another change ♪
♪ Still you forced your way ♪
♪ Into my scheme of things ♪
♪ You say we're growing ♪
♪ Growing heart and soul... ♪
I really started thinking about
where I was gonna go with it, and what I could do for her,
and how I could be
some kind of valuable contribution
to a relationship.
♪ Sweet name you're born once again for me ♪
♪ Sweet name you're born once again for me... ♪
It became a process over the first year or so,
trying to balance my life in terms of well,
how many of these precious moments
am I willing to give away at my age, 45?
Do I want to keep on inundating myself
with one work project after another, and sort of,
leave virtually no room for a real, solid,
wonderful relationship to start blooming?
♪ Lord, I kneel and offer you ♪
♪ My word on a wing ♪
INTERVIEWER: Tour plans. Any tour plans?
Unfortunately not. No, not this time.
As you know, I've only been married seven months,
and I really want to spend more time within the marriage.
I think the worst thing to do is run away for a year.
I really do.
♪ Lord ♪
♪ My prayer flies like a word on a wing ♪
♪ Does my prayer fit in with your scheme of things? ♪
DAVID: There's a certain buoyancy that you can develop
as you get older
if you are capable of absorbing that it's a finite life,
and a finite existence.
And it's a kind of a knowledge
that you cannot possibly entertain
when you're young.
You cannot entertain the real magnificence
and inevitability of the short span of years
that we spend on the earth.
And I think if you are really honest
with that reality,
you can have a kind of a freedom,
artistically, spiritually, and emotionally
that you don't have when you're young.
♪ Ooh, ready to shape the scheme of things ♪
The idea of holding on to anything
that's manifested seems farcical.
There is nothing to hold onto.
Youth, physical things, or...
definitely possessions.
The 20th century concern
is how we put our new god back together again.
I think that we're coming into an era of chaos,
and chaos has meaning in our lives,
and I think that we have to re-adapt
our interpretation of religion and spirituality
to suit our new millennium.
Chaos and fragmentation is something
that I've always been very comfortable with.
That obviously is my through-line.
Because I've always felt
that there's no real central one truth in life.
That the way we live is trying to make sense
of the endless vortex of fragments.
That essentially, we try and pull
these weedy little truths
and absolutes
out of this kind of mindless chaos,
which is the real universe.
There's something about the 90s that I really like.
There's something in the air that I recognize.
I think it's all the frag--
all the fragments flying around in the chaos.
It feels really... I kind of... I know this stuff.
[HALLO SPACEBOY SONG]
♪ Spaceboy ♪
♪ You're sleepy now ♪
♪ Your silhouette ♪
♪ Is so stationary ♪
♪ You're released but your custody calls ♪
♪ And I want to be free ♪
♪ Don't you want to be free ♪
♪ Do you like girls or boys ♪
♪ Yeah, it's confusing these days ♪
♪ But Moondust will cover you ♪
♪ Cover you ♪
♪ This chaos is killing me ♪
♪ So bye bye love ♪
♪ Bye bye love ♪
♪ This chaos is killing me ♪
♪ Sweet sweet dove ♪
♪ Bye bye Spaceboy ♪
♪ Bye bye love ♪
♪ Moondust will cover you ♪
[I HAVE NOT BEEN TO OXFORD TOWN SONG]
♪ All is well ♪
♪ 20th century dies ♪
♪ Toll the bell ♪
♪ Pay the private eye ♪
♪ All is well ♪
♪ 20th century dies ♪
[MAN SPEAKS FRENCH]
DAVID: I think, I think it has something to do
with being able to reach the end of any one day
and feel that you took from it
and gave back to it as much as possible.
I hate to waste days.
I've just been feeling a lot more comfortable
with life, and myself, and my writing
and everything as the years go by,
so it's... I just happen to be in a great place.
I'm really lucky in that way.
'Cause I look at some of my mates,
and some contemporaries,
and I know some of them feel, I don't know, tired, or bitter,
or you know, a number of things
that traditionally are supposed to go
with getting older, you know?
And I've just been very fortunate
that it just hasn't happened to me.
I just feel really-- I'm pretty keen on everything.
I've just landed on my feet.
I've done and do everything I've always wanted to do,
you know?
That's been--
INTERVIEWER: That's a great thing.
DAVID: Oh, it's extraordinary. It really is extraordinary.
I've an incredible life.
It's been amazing.
I would love to do it again.
I was determined, ever since I was 16,
that I would have the greatest adventure
that any one person could ever have.
And I set my sails in the general direction
of uncharted waters.
I put myself through everything--
absolutely everything, that came along.
It was very important for me to expand my horizons
and seeing just how--
just how near to the line I could get.
I've been so eclectic all my life.
I've been admiring of so many different people
and so many different things that they've done,
I feel that I owe so many for the way that I think
and do things.
I guess anybody who's had the integrity
to kind of always work outside of the system,
has always appealed to me.
Whenever I'm teetering on sort of what I know
is what I do best, and what I really feel for,
and there's an area that I think that,
well, an audience I know would like this,
I just remember back
to how much I hate the center of the social strata,
how I hate being drawn into the middle,
to the middle of the road of anything,
to that which is most popular.
And if-- The other thing I would say is that
if you feel safe in the area that you're working in,
you're not working in the right area.
Always go a little further into the water
than you feel you're capable of being in.
Go a little bit out of your depth,
and when you don't feel
that your feet are quite touching the bottom,
you're just about in the right place
to do something exciting.
Let me tell you one thing.
All people, no matter who they are,
they all wish they'd appreciated life more.
It's what you do in life that's important,
not how much time you have, or what you wish you'd done.
[BLACKSTAR SONG]
♪ Something happened on the day he died ♪
♪ Spirit rose a meter then stepped aside ♪
♪ Somebody else took his place and bravely cried ♪
♪ I'm a blackstar ♪
♪ Oooooo... ♪
There is no beginning, no end.
And all at once,
the outward appearance of meaning is transcended,
and you find yourself struggling to comprehend a deep
and formidable mystery.
I'm dying.
You are dying.
Second by second, all is transient.
Does it matter? Do I bother?
Yes I do.
Life is fantastic.
It never ends. It only changes.
Flesh to stone to flesh.
And round and round.
Best keep walking.
[MEMORY OF A FREE FESTIVAL SONG]
♪ The Sun Machine is coming down ♪
♪ And we're gonna have a party ♪
♪ Uh-huh huh ♪
♪ The Sun Machine is coming down ♪
♪ And we're gonna have a party ♪
♪ Uh-huh huh ♪
♪ The Sun Machine is coming down ♪
♪ And we're gonna have a party ♪
♪ Uh-huh huh ♪
♪ The Sun Machine is coming down ♪
♪ And we're gonna have a party ♪
♪ Uh-huh huh ♪
♪ The Sun Machine is coming down ♪
♪ Whoa ho uh-ha ♪
♪ The Sun Machine is coming down ♪
♪ Whoa ho uh-ha ♪
♪ The Sun Machine is coming down ♪
♪ Whoa ho uh-ha ♪
♪ The Sun Machine is coming down ♪
♪ Whoa ho uh-ha ♪
♪ Na-na-na ♪
♪ The Sun Machine is coming down ♪
♪ And we're gonna have a party ♪
♪ The Sun Machine is coming down ♪
♪ And we're gonna have a party ♪
♪ The Sun Machine is coming down ♪
♪ And we're gonna have a party ♪
♪ The Sun Machine is coming down ♪
♪ And we're gonna have a party ♪
♪ The Sun Machine is coming down ♪
♪ And we're gonna have a party ♪
♪ The Sun Machine is coming down ♪
♪ And we're gonna have a party ♪
♪ The Sun Machine is coming down ♪
♪ And we're gonna have a party ♪
♪ The Sun Machine is coming down ♪
♪ And we're gonna have a party ♪
♪ The Sun Machine is coming down ♪
♪ And we're gonna have a party... ♪
[STARMAN SONG]
♪ Hey, now now ♪
♪ Goodbye love ♪
♪ Didn't know what time it was, the lights were low-ow-ow ♪
♪ I leaned back on my radio-o-o ♪
♪ Some cat was layin' down some rock 'n' roll ♪
♪ "Lotta soul" he said ♪
♪ Then the loud sound did seem to fade-ade-ade ♪
♪ Came back like a slow voice on a wave of phase-ase-ase ♪
♪ That weren't no DJ, that was hazy cosmic jive ♪
♪ There's a starman waiting in the sky ♪
♪ He'd like to come and meet us ♪
♪ But he thinks he'd blow our minds ♪
♪ There's a starman waiting in the sky ♪
♪ He's told us not to blow it ♪
♪ 'Cause he knows it's all worthwhile ♪
♪ He told me Let the children lose it ♪
♪ Let the children use it ♪
♪ Let all the children boogie ♪
♪ I had to phone someone so I picked on you-ou-ou ♪
♪ Hey, that's far out, so you heard him too-oo-oo ♪
♪ Switch on the TV, we may pick him up on channel two ♪
♪ Look out your window, I can see his light-ight-ight ♪
♪ If we can sparkle he may land tonight-ight-ight ♪
♪ Don't tell your poppa ♪
♪ Or he'll get us locked up in fright ♪
♪ There's a starman waiting in the sky ♪
♪ He'd like to come and meet us ♪
♪ But he thinks he'd blow our minds ♪
♪ There's a starman waiting in the sky ♪
♪ He's told us not to blow it ♪
♪ 'Cause he knows it's all worthwhile, he told me ♪
♪ Let the children lose it Let the children use it ♪
♪ Let all the children boogie ♪
♪ Starman waiting in the sky ♪
♪ He'd like to come and meet us ♪
♪ But he thinks he'd blow our minds ♪
♪ There's a starman waiting in the sky ♪
♪ He's told us not to blow it ♪
♪ 'Cause he knows it's all worthwhile ♪
♪ He told me Let the children lose it ♪
♪ Let the children use it ♪
♪ Let all the children boogie ♪
♪ La, la, la, la-la ♪
♪ La, la, la La, la, la, la-la ♪
♪ La, la, la La, la, la, la-la. ♪
[CHANGES SONG]
♪ Oh yeah ♪
♪ Mmmm ♪
♪ Still don't know what I was waitin' for ♪
♪ And my time was running wild ♪
♪ A million dead-end streets and ♪
♪ Every time I thought I'd got it made ♪
♪ It seemed the taste was not so sweet ♪
♪ So I turned myself to face me ♪
♪ But I've never caught a glimpse ♪
♪ How the others must see the faker ♪
♪ I'm much too fast to take that test ♪
♪ Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes ♪
♪ Turn and face the strange ♪
♪ Ch-ch-changes ♪
♪ Don't want to be a richer man ♪
♪ Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes ♪
♪ Turn and face the strange ♪
♪ Ch-ch-changes ♪
♪ There's gonna have to be a different man ♪
♪ Time may change me ♪
♪ But I can't trace time ♪
♪ I said that time may change me ♪
♪ But I can't trace time. ♪
DAVID: Well you know what?
This has been an incredible pleasure,
and, uh, you were really interesting.
I didn't know those things you were telling me
about yourselves. It's nice to have met you.
I'm glad we did finally meet at last.
And all I can say is, ♪ Goodbye ♪
♪ Goodbye We'll meet again ♪
♪ Some time ♪
♪ Somewhere fa-ta-ta ta-ta-ta-ta ♪
♪ Ta-da. ♪