I've received a remarkable number of emails in the last week more or less taunting me to eschew my usual Jerome Kern and Cole Porter and pick a David Bowie number for our Song of the Week. Well, I like a challenge, and, given that the British press has been full of people with not a thing to say about Bowie saying it at great length, I figured that I might as well get a piece of the action. That said, it would be hard to beat this last word in Bowie-eulogizing from The Croydon Advertiser:
Old Coulsdon man delivered David Bowie's milk in summer of '69
THE Old Coulsdon man who delivered David Bowie's milk during the summer of '69 remembers the music legend as a "nice man" who "had time for people".
Chris Phillips, now 61, was just 15 when he decided to get a milk van to see him through the summer holidays...
"When I started my milk round they said 'will you please deliver the milk around the back of this house because the guy living there thinks he is going to be a rock star'," Chris said...
Chris, who went to Quernmore School, said Bowie - a former Croydon College pupil - ordered three bottles of silver top milk to be delivered every couple of days.
Three bottles of silver-top. A lot of milk for one so thin. I think that's the only real insight into Bowie I've gleaned in the last seven days' worth of media grief-feasting. I can't compete with that, but I did my best to rustle up a Ziggy Goldtop song for this slot. I've recounted before the tale of how young Bowie wound up writing the first English lyric of "My Way" (with Anthony Newley in mind), and I often find myself, when the song pops up on the radio, singing along with the Bowie text. And this close to Christmas I could always dust off his duet with Bing, recorded at Elstree in September 1977 for that year's Crosby Christmas special. A month later Bing dropped dead on a Spanish golf course, and the show was aired posthumously. There had been some last-minute drama surrounding Bowie's appearance on the show. The producers informed him that he'd be singing his song "Heroes" and then doing "Little Drummer Boy" with Bing. "I hate that song!" he fumed. "I'm only doing the show because my mum loves Bing. But I refuse to sing 'Little Drummer Boy'." And he meant it.
This was the day before they were due to record, and they already had the arrangement of "Drummer Boy", and Bing liked it. So Buz Kohan, the show's producer and writer, and Ian Fraser, the British conductor, got together with Larry Grossman, an old hand at special material, and in half-an-hour wrote a contrapuntal theme that Bowie could sing over the existing chart of "Drummer Boy". That's the "Peace On Earth" part of the number - and Ian Fraser hastily arranged the middle-eight for the orchestra so that Bing could join in on part of the new song. He evidently enjoyed it, hailing young David as "a real fine asset to the show", as well as "a clean-cut kid", which no one had hitherto accused Bowie of. And so the man who introduced "White Christmas" wound up partially introducing one last Christmas song in the final weeks of his life. All because David Bowie threw a big hissy fit.
But "Peace On Earth" and "My Way" aren't exactly typical of the Bowie oeuvre, so I thought we'd have something closer to the core of his catalogue. We're all about songs in this space, and usually standard songs, which means songs that can be performed by a diverse range of interpreters. True, Barbra Streisand recorded "Life On Mars", but Bowie pronounced her version "bloody awful. Sorry, Barb, but it was atrocious." The Bay City Rollers did "Rebel Rebel". And I briefly considered "Cat People" for my new cat album, before deciding I didn't want Bowie roaring, "This is the most atrocious, bloody awful thing since Streisand!" So, Bowie cover-wise, I figure you have to go with:
Oh, no
Not me
I never lost control
You're face
To face
With The Man Who Sold The World...
If you're a Brit baby boomer, you hear those words in Lulu's voice. If you're an American Gen Xer, it's Kurt Cobain's with Nirvana. But the song is by David Bowie, from the 1970 LP of the same name, his third album and the one generally regarded as marking the inauguration of Bowie as Bowie, which is why he's draped over a chaise longue in such a nice frock on the cover (in Britain, that is - the American release opted for something less dressy). "The Man Who Sold The World" wasn't meant to be the title track. It was the last song on Side Two, and the last to be written. Just three other persons were involved in the making of the album: producer/bass guitarist Tony Visconti, lead guitarist Mick Ronson and drummer Woody Woodmansey, and in the years since they've all given the impression that during its creation Bowie wasn't always to hand when needed. "We just laid down the chords, the arrangements, the guitar solos, the synthesizers," said Visconti, "and David would be in the lobby, holding hands with Angie" - his bride of recent vintage.
"He was still kind of lovey-dovey," said Woodmansey," and he wasn't around a lot, so he would just give us the chords and say, 'Well, this is kind of how it goes, and I haven't got the lyrics finished on this yet, so just put it together.'"
Mick Ronson credited Visconti as the guy who did just that: "I was glad to have a person that keen on the team because Bowie was really uninterested."
Eventually the singer got sick of all this historical revisionism: "I really did object to the impression given in some articles that I did not write the songs on The Man Who Sold the World," he said. "You only have to check out the chord changes. No one writes chord changes like that. The sonic landscape was Visconti's. The band contribution, how the drums and bass should work together with the guitar, was something Mick got really involved in." But the songs, he insisted, were his.
On the last day of mixing at Advision Studios, they still didn't have the closing song. Visconti was in the control room waiting, and Bowie was out in reception writing the lyric. When he'd finished, he hurried into the booth and put down the vocal:
We passed upon the stair
We spoke of was and when
Although I wasn't there
He said I was his friend
Which came as some surprise
I spoke into his eyes
I thought you died alone
A long long time ago...
They mixed the track and sent off the tapes that night. The working name of the album had been Metrobolist, a cross between Fritz Lang's Metropolis and a somnambulist. But, after hearing "The Man Who Sold The World", everyone agreed that's what was needed on the front of the sleeve. The title is generally assumed to come from Robert Heinlein's 1949 novella The Man Who Sold The Moon, the tale of a lunar robber baron. But all that stairway-passing seems more obviously an allusion to "Antigonish", a famous poem by Hughes Mearns supposedly about a haunted house in Nova Scotia:
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today,
I wish, I wish he'd go away...
Over the course of the century it became a much quoted verse - I've used it myself, with reference to John Kerry. And somewhere along the way, via a newspaper story or a BBC anecdotalist, it lodged somewhere in David Bowie's head. In "The Man Who Sold The World", it's generally believed that the meeting on the stair of two men who aren't there refers to two sides of the self, a man either encountering an aspect of his personality he's left behind - as Bowie would do serially in the years ahead - or perhaps a side of himself he's yet to find. As the writer himself said:
I guess I wrote it because there was a part of myself that I was looking for. Maybe now that I feel more comfortable with the way that I live my life and my mental state and my spiritual state whatever, maybe I feel there's some kind of unity now. That song for me always exemplified kind of how you feel when you're young, when you know that there's a piece of yourself that you haven't really put together yet. You have this great searching, this great need to find out who you really are.
Alternatively, it refers to Bowie's worries about mental health:
I'd been seeing quite a bit of my half-brother during that period and I think a lot of it, obviously, had been working on me. I think this shadow is on quite a lot of the material in a way. Knowing about the fragility of mental stability in my family in general, on my mother's side particularly, I think I was going through an awful lot of concern about exactly what my mental condition was and where it may lead.
Whatever. In the old Tin Pan Alley, the point was clarity, reinforced:
If I Knew You Were Coming, I'd've Baked A Cake
Baked a cake
Baked a cake
If I Knew You Were Coming, I'd've Baked A Cake
Howdja do?
Howdja do?
Howdja do?
In the new Tin Pan Alley, impenetrability was very commercial, as long as it gave the sense that it was about something deep and profound. Which this one did:
Oh, no
Not me
I never lost control
You're face
To face
With The Man Who Sold The World...
In his forensic examination of Bowie's songs, Chris O'Leary notes the duality of the song structure. The verse is in the voice of one man, the chorus that of the other:
'Oh no, not me' the specter (or the man) says, happily denying the charge. You could read it as 'Death hasn't come for me, it never will.'
Well, yeah, you could. But you could also sort of tell the lyric's a first draft:
I gazed a gazely stare...
I stared a starely gaze? Is that good? Or is it something you mean to fix later? And by then it's so well known that you never can? Still, the "stare" does have a nice symmetry with the "stair" of the first verse. And, as the rockologist James E Perone wrote, "The main thing that the song does is to paint – however elusively – the title character as another example of the societal outcasts who populate the album." So there's that.
Besides, it was an LP track, never intended to be a single. That the song became one, four years later, was thanks to an apparently chance encounter between Bowie and Lulu. The latter is the big-voiced wee Scots lassie who burst on the British pop scene as a teenager with her spirited cover of the Isley Brothers' "Shout" in 1964. Three years later she had an American Number One and a global hit with "To Sir With Love" (by my old friend Don Black), and a couple of years after that she won the Eurovision Song Contest with one of the handful of songs that sums up half-a-century of bouncy-bouncy Europop, "Boom Bang-A-Bang".
By 1974 the hits had thinned out a bit, but Lulu had become a mainstay of BBC Light Entertainment, the sort of person you expect to see at least once a week on telly, if not on her own show, then on someone else's, singing whatever was put in front of her. A long, long time ago, Lulu was a guest on my radio show and I asked her how it was that she came to be singing David Bowie - because, back then, a Lulu/Bowie combo seemed only marginally less unlikely than Bowie and Bing.
"I met him in Paris," she said, "and he invited me to his show" - and then to a recording session at the Château d'Hérouville. "And he said to me he thought I was a great singer and he wanted to record with me and we could make a hell of a record together" - or, as she has more latterly phrased it, "a muthaf**ker of a record". "And I thought, yeah, they all say that. But he got back about it two days later. He was übercool and I was very cozy and BBC teatime. So I thought it might be good for me and just put myself in his hands."
Bowie himself played sax on the recording, right from the first bar of the intro. It's not great, it's nothing special, but the new lick immediately moves the song away from the dour internal monologue of the original and opens it up to the world. (It was an early example of the insistent sax riffs that would become fashionable on big Seventies pop hits like "Baker Street".) As for Lulu, "David liked my voice," she told me, "but he didn't like the way I'd been using it."
"You mean, the songs? The poppy things? He didn't like 'Boom Bang-A-Bang'?"
She laughed. "In the studio he kept telling me to smoke more cigarettes, because he wanted me to sound" - she waved her hands - "'sultrier'." She demonstrated to me what Bowie had in mind: She was a belter on her hits, letting the words sit up at the front of her mouth, and he wanted her to keep them with a little bit of rasp back in her throat, and to bite on the ends of the consonants, very emphatically:
Oh, no
Not me
I never lost control...
For the video and telly appearances, Lulu looked like a Seventies version of a Thirties gangster - a bit Bugsy Malone for my tastes, but I think they were aiming for Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. She had a red carnation in her buttonhole, but the tie looked like something from the discount rack at Marks & Spencer. Weimar chic would become something of a style cliché in the years ahead, but it was still a novelty in 1974 - so much so that many observers assumed that the bespoke transvestite was merely Lulu trying to look like a diminutive Bowie.
Also she barely moved. "You're usually very animated," I said to her.
"I can't help myself, Mark," she giggled.
"But here you're standing stock still for the whole song, very deadpan..."
"It wasn't easy for me," she said, "but that's how they thought I should do it. It helped" - she laughed again - "that I don't have the faintest idea what the song is about." If Bowie's somewhat metallic vocal is an interior soliloquy, Lulu's is more like a news report. This happened, and then that happened:
I laughed and shook his hand
And made my way back home
I searched for form and land
For years and years I roamed
I gazed a gazely stare
At all the millions here
We must have died alone
A long long time ago...
The record features the original guitarist, Mick Ronson, although playing in very different style. And Bowie joins in on backing vocals, as the man who isn't there:
Oh, no
Not me
I never lost control
You're face
To face
With The Man Who Sold The World...
It's striking that, having let Visconti and Ronson take the driver's seat on his own version of "The Man", Bowie exercised far more control in the studio for Lulu's remake.
I wasn't a great interviewer back then, but, even as she was telling me the story behind the record, I kind of felt there was something missing, although I wasn't sure what. It became clear - and should in hindsight have been obvious - a few years ago when she revealed that she and Bowie had been lovers. As she told The Daily Mail:
Like an Antiques Roadshow expert assessing a porcelain lily vase, Lulu's hands describe two gentle downward curves in the air.
'David Bowie's thighs were incredible,' trills the 66-year-old Scottish singer with barely concealed yearning.
'Long and slim but muscly,' she marvels.
'Not pumped up but really powerful. 'They were strong, even though he was emaciated at the time. I often think that he had similarly shaped thighs to Naomi Campbell.'
Whoa. TMI, as they say. For those of us who've always been a little bit sweet on Lulu, the thought of her and David Bowie's thighs is distressingly vivid. Bowie's mum may have loved Bing Crosby, but Lulu's mum found her daughter's new boyfriend "the weirdest thing she'd ever seen".
"The Man Who Sold The World" is a fine record, but it wasn't a hit in America, where Lulu remains known mainly for "To Sir With Love". So, a generation on, some guy in Seattle is rummaging around a second-hand record store and finds an old LP of The Man Who Sold The World, and he puts it on cassette so he can listen to it in his car. Which his how his bandmates come to hear it. The driver was Chad Channing, a drummer, and the other fellows in the car were Krist Novoselic and Kurt Cobain. And Cobain can't quite wrap his head around the idea that this song he likes is by David Bowie. Because it doesn't sound a bit like the David Bowie of "Let's Dance", which was the great chameleon's then current iteration. Yet Nirvana liked the track, and they worked up their own version of the song - very different from Bowie or Lulu, with Kurt Cobain singing it with real emotion:
Although I wasn't there
He said I was his friend
- on which thought he manages to put a combination of disbelief and self-disgust.
Cobain's affection for the number remained more or less unknown to the world until 1993 when they were booked on MTV's "Unplugged", the show on which technologically enhanced rockers are supposed to play stripped-down, acoustic versions of their big hits. So MTV were none too happy when Nirvana informed them that, instead of "Smells Like Teen Spirit", they had in mind a cover version of a David Bowie song hardly anyone in North America had heard of. It went down well, and was much played on the radio. Five months later, Kurt Cobain killed himself.
Bowie always said he regrets not being able to talk to him about the song. "It was a good straightforward rendition and sounded somehow very honest." On the other hand, ever after, when Bowie himself performed the song in America, there would be "kids that come up afterwards and say, 'It's cool you're doing a Nirvana song.' And I think, 'F**k you, you little tosser.'"
Lulu told me the whole androgynous Marlene Dietrich thing had been her idea. And, although she and Bowie never really worked together again, that Berlin cabaret shtick stuck with him, to one degree or another, to the end of his life. Unlike other rockers of his vintage, he never sloughed off a Great American Songbook album, but he did pick and choose among the old stuff. Four years after Lulu's Marlene act, Bowie returned to the Weimar vibe with a version of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's "Alabama Song". Unlike, say, Bobby Darin's "Mack The Knife", this is not an English version of Brecht's German lyric, but a song ol' Bert (with a bit of help from Elisabeth Hauptmann) wrote in American from the get-go. In 1927, in the Baden Baden production of the otherwise all-German Mahagonny Songspiel, Lotte Lenya sang this as in English. It's something of a schizophrenic song, divided between the legato refrain - "O moon of Alabama" - and the angry verses - "Oh, show me the way to the next whisky bar..." Bowie's and Tony Visconti's arrangement seemed designed to widen the divide, and, as Charles Shaar Murray and Roy Carr wrote, ensured it would "disrupt any radio programme on which it was lucky to get played". The assumption was that he'd done it to get out of his RCA contract, but in fact it wound up getting to Number 23 on the British charts. Lulu might have taken it a little higher.
The following year he released another single - Dimitri ("High Noon") Tiomkin and Ned ("The Nearness Of You") Washington's theme for the 1957 film Wild Is The Wind. On the big screen, it was sung by Johnny Mathis, but's better known in a version by Nina Simone, which moves it closer to the scuffed stage of a down-at-heel club. "Wild Is The Wind" is now a minor standard, thanks in part to Bowie's cover, and we owe him a debt of gratitude for that. He was selective about the songs of others - hence his antipathy to "Little Drummer Boy" - but when he chose to do them he was fully engaged, he had a point of view. And he brought something of that same quality to Lulu's version of his own song:
Who knows?
Not me
We never lost control
You're face
To face
With The Man Who Sold The World...
Or thigh to thigh, gulp. Rest in peace.
