Not counting yesterday, the last time I shed a tear was about a year ago, when I heard a mpeg file of my daughter Ana singing an aria from Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. Turning to different music, the stanza "don't forget to keep your head warm, twinkle twinkle Uncle Floyd", from David Bowie's Slip Away (Heathen, 2003) was one of Ana and her sister Maria´s standard nursery rhymes (others, also taught by me, included excerpts of Tom Waits' Cold Water and Nick Cave's cover of Tom Springfield's The Carnival is Over; the girls turned out fine though).
Andy Warhol revived, perhaps unaware, the practice of the great Dutch painters of the XVII Century of just signing the paintings produced in their studios, which were actually painted by their assistants and pupils. When your style and brand name are good enough, the reasoning was, you don’t need to bother to do more than sign. David Bowie went one up on that: he didn’t even bother to sign. From the mid 70's onwards, he mesmerized successive generations of musicians into emulating him with various degrees of success, either copying him to the T (e.g.Bauhaus' version of Ziggy Stardust, 1982) or mixing his style with other influences to create new sounds [e.g. the 2 first seminal records of The Human League, Reproduction (1979) and Travelogue (1980)], just to mention personal favourites. On this, I could go on forever.
David Bowie was a 70's musician. His musical output is relevant between 1969 and 1983. What he did before and after was often very good, never crucial. He was though a very good composer, and singer, and multi-instrumentalist, and a soulful sax player. As actor and mime he was superior: I saw him once some 30 years ago in Lisbon in a football stadium (Bowie being one of the very few musicians, and if memory serves the last, for whom I briefly suspended my boycott on stadium concerts) and I remember how he could singlehandedly fill a 30 meter stage, just black trousers, white shirt and undone bow tie. Of all his many and impressive talents, however, the greatest was poetry. Read, if you never have, Young Americans or Heroes.
Bowie also acted in movies, and lets not forget that's what The MacMahonian is about. In retrospect, his choice of roles seems to follow a deliberate design. Chronological selection, not counting cameos: his signature The Man who Fell to Earth (Nicholas Roeg, 1976), Just a Gigolo (David Hemming, 1978, with Marlene Dietrich in her last role), designer vampire in the chi-chi The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983,with Catherine Deneuve as co-vampiress) heroic brit officer in a jap POW camp in Furyo (Nagisa Oshima, 1983), early wide boy in Absolute Beginners (Julien Temple, 1986, btw title song reportedly made Bowie cry, fulfilling the wish he expressed some 10 years before in Young Americans, see above), Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988), an unforgettable Andy Warhol in Basquiat (Julian Schnabel, 1996) and finally and eerily presciently trying to cheat death in The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006).
His death was up to the measure of his life: I dare you to watch his last video, entitled et pour cause Lazarus, released on his 69th birthday just 2 days before he died, and keep your Adam´s apple steady.
So the man who felt to Earth in 1976 went back up in 40 years later. In the meantime, among many other things, he inspired many to change their clothes and encouraged many others to leave their closets. Thank you very much David Jones. Very much indeed.
Andy Warhol revived, perhaps unaware, the practice of the great Dutch painters of the XVII Century of just signing the paintings produced in their studios, which were actually painted by their assistants and pupils. When your style and brand name are good enough, the reasoning was, you don’t need to bother to do more than sign. David Bowie went one up on that: he didn’t even bother to sign. From the mid 70's onwards, he mesmerized successive generations of musicians into emulating him with various degrees of success, either copying him to the T (e.g.Bauhaus' version of Ziggy Stardust, 1982) or mixing his style with other influences to create new sounds [e.g. the 2 first seminal records of The Human League, Reproduction (1979) and Travelogue (1980)], just to mention personal favourites. On this, I could go on forever.
David Bowie was a 70's musician. His musical output is relevant between 1969 and 1983. What he did before and after was often very good, never crucial. He was though a very good composer, and singer, and multi-instrumentalist, and a soulful sax player. As actor and mime he was superior: I saw him once some 30 years ago in Lisbon in a football stadium (Bowie being one of the very few musicians, and if memory serves the last, for whom I briefly suspended my boycott on stadium concerts) and I remember how he could singlehandedly fill a 30 meter stage, just black trousers, white shirt and undone bow tie. Of all his many and impressive talents, however, the greatest was poetry. Read, if you never have, Young Americans or Heroes.
Bowie also acted in movies, and lets not forget that's what The MacMahonian is about. In retrospect, his choice of roles seems to follow a deliberate design. Chronological selection, not counting cameos: his signature The Man who Fell to Earth (Nicholas Roeg, 1976), Just a Gigolo (David Hemming, 1978, with Marlene Dietrich in her last role), designer vampire in the chi-chi The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983,with Catherine Deneuve as co-vampiress) heroic brit officer in a jap POW camp in Furyo (Nagisa Oshima, 1983), early wide boy in Absolute Beginners (Julien Temple, 1986, btw title song reportedly made Bowie cry, fulfilling the wish he expressed some 10 years before in Young Americans, see above), Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988), an unforgettable Andy Warhol in Basquiat (Julian Schnabel, 1996) and finally and eerily presciently trying to cheat death in The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006).
His death was up to the measure of his life: I dare you to watch his last video, entitled et pour cause Lazarus, released on his 69th birthday just 2 days before he died, and keep your Adam´s apple steady.
So the man who felt to Earth in 1976 went back up in 40 years later. In the meantime, among many other things, he inspired many to change their clothes and encouraged many others to leave their closets. Thank you very much David Jones. Very much indeed.