How Bowie’s death became his last great work

The final act of David Bowie might have been his most audacious; the baffling flourish of a great magician vanishing before our eyes, never to reappear, leaving us with a sense of awe and a mystery that will never be solved.

“Something happened on the day he died / Spirit rose a metre and stepped aside,” Bowie sang on the extraordinary title track of Blackstar, his 26th album, released on January 8, 2016 – his 69th birthday. It followed on the heels of a strange and moving single Lazarus.

“Look up here, I’m in heaven,” Bowie sang in a disturbing video, where he thrashed in a hospital bed with bandages on his face and buttons for eyes, before stepping into a cupboard and closing the door behind him.

Blackstar was greeted with exultation by fans and critics, a weird, gorgeous, wondrously opaque late-period masterpiece from one of popular culture’s most revered geniuses.

Two days later, it was reported that Bowie was dead.

The Telegraph published the world’s first review of Blackstar, on December 18, 2015, accidentally breaking an embargo that Bowie’s representatives forgot to ask me to sign. I had listened to it in the offices of his PR, and I was utterly enraptured. I wrote an enthusiastic piece declaring, “Like a modern-day Lazarus of pop, Bowie is well and truly back from beyond.”

When the reality of his death sank in that morning, I walked downstairs to my office in a daze. It was as if the whole album was spinning around in my head, refracting from different angles, and I saw what should have been staring me in the face. Bowie had written his own requiem.

The fall and rise of the Spider from Mars

On January 1, a major new biography will be published by New Modern, entitled Lazarus: The Second Coming of David Bowie, by historian Alexander Larman. This will be followed on January 3 by a new Channel 4 documentary, Bowie: The Final Act. Effectively marking 10 years since Bowie’s death, both represent attempts to make sense of that last mysterious flourish by reflecting and contrasting with periods when Bowie seemed to have lost his once near-infallible intuition for the hot pulse of the cultural zeitgeist.

Bowie’s 12 bravura, experimental albums, from The Man Who Sold the World in 1970 to Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) in 1980. may be the most outrageous hot streak in music history, crowned in 1983 by the 10 million-selling Let’s Dance. Mainstream success, though, sat uneasily with Bowie, and by the end of the 1980s he seemed to be suffering a crisis of confidence that led him to renounce his back catalogue and form a pedestrian hard rock band, the unloved Tin Machine.

Both the biography and documentary zero in on a Melody Maker review of the second Tin Machine album (Tin Machine II) from 1991, with John Wilde writing, “Hot tramp! We loved you so. Now sit down, man. You’re a f---ing disgrace.” So many years later, Wilde looks shamefaced to admit that Bowie’s PR Alan Edwards told him the performer wept when he read the piece.

Arguably, the second coming of David Bowie occurred when he headlined Glastonbury Festival in 2000, having apparently made peace with his back catalogue and settling into an exalted role as retro rock god catering to audience nostalgia. Four years later, this period of vintage grace came to a painful end when he suffered a series of heart attacks on stage.

It is disturbing to watch footage of Bowie at the T-Mobile Arena in Prague in 2004, clutching his shoulder in distress. “I’m sorry, I can’t continue, I’m in too much pain,” he croaks, before walking into the wings while the band played on. Three days later, he played a full set at the Hurricane Festival in Scheeßel, Germany, but collapsed after coming offstage and was rushed to hospital.

It was later reported that he had suffered two heart attacks but had pushed through a three-song encore with the use of painkillers. He had emergency surgery for a blocked artery. He was 57 years old. “And then there was silence,” his trusted guitarist Earl Slick notes in the Channel 4 documentary. “Nine years of it.”

The Third Coming of David Bowie

The third coming of David Bowie arrived out of the blue on his 66th birthday, in January 2013, when the long-absent star dropped a new single unannounced. The sad and discombobulating Where Are We Now? became a major world news event, blindsiding the information era to create delirious anticipation for a surprise new album, The Next Day, released in March. It was fantastic, a burst of guitar-led art rock resonant with echoes of a long career, and yet tighter, spikier and just plain weirder than anything you might expect from a man with a bus pass.

His timing was (of course) immaculate, effectively hijacking media hoopla over a long-planned retrospective exhibition at the V&A museum entitled David Bowie Is, The Next Day reached number one in 19 countries (number two in the US). Without giving a single interview or live performance, Bowie was suddenly everywhere, riding a wave of acclaim for the greatest comeback in pop history.

Next Day was an album nobody saw coming, recorded over two years under conditions of tight secrecy, with long-time producer Tony Visconti and a small band of close musical confederates. The songs had been written in complete privacy and work took place over two years, mainly in a dingy, windowless studio a short stroll from his New York apartment.

How death became Bowie’s last collaborator

The creation and release of The Next Day’s follow-up, Blackstar, was even more shrouded in mystery. Seeds were sown when Bowie saw avant-jazz bandleader and composer Maria Schneider perform with her orchestra in May 2013. They subsequently worked together on two songs, Sue (Or In a Season of Crime) and ’Tis a Pity She Was a Wh---e, which both appeared on a fascinating career retrospective, Nothing Has Changed in 2014 (and were also re-recorded for Blackstar). Saxophonist Donny McCaslin provided solos, instructed by Schneider to improvise around Bowie’s vocals.

Bowie also began working on new songs for the Lazarus musical he was developing with playwright Enda Walsh and director Ivo van Hove, inspired by The Man Who Fell to Earth. In hindsight, there was a certain urgency to his endeavours. He persuaded van Hove to cancel another project in order to premiere Lazarus by the end of 2015. “He was in a hurry,” recalled van Hove. “I asked him why and he said: ‘I’m f---ing 68!’”

When Schneider was unable to commit to longer sessions, Bowie turned his attention to Donny McCaslin’s quartet. The saxophone was Bowie’s first instrument, inspired by a bohemian, jazz-loving elder half-brother, Terry Burns. Bowie said that, when he was starting out, he couldn’t decide if he wanted “to be a rock’n’roll singer or John Coltrane”.

McCaslin’s quartet featured drummer Mark Guiliana, bassist Tim Lefebvre and keyboardist Jason Lindner playing freewheeling improvised instrumentals rooted in Seventies jazz fusion with a dash of futuristic electronica. Bowie invited the band to secret recording sessions with Visconti at the Magic Shop, a small, independent studio in lower Manhattan. Jazz guitarist and composer Ben Monder also contributed, with Bowie playing acoustic guitar. On the day before sessions were scheduled to begin, Bowie summoned Visconti to his office for “a chinwag”. He was wearing a woolly hat and had no eyebrows. Recognising the signs of chemotherapy, Visconti burst into tears.

Bowie had received a diagnosis of liver cancer in the summer of 2014, but only informed close family. By November 2015, he knew it was terminal. By then, he had completed recording, was preparing for the opening of the musical on November 18 and was in the process of filming promotional videos for the singles Blackstar and Lazarus. “I have to tell you that I am very ill and probably going to die,” he warned director Johan Renck. Renck later said, “He wanted death to be a third collaborator… to be there as a presence in formulating all the ideas.”

A surreal, funereal, long-form video for Blackstar was unveiled on November 19, 2015, featuring a dead astronaut on an alien planet beneath a black sun, a smiley face pinned to his space suit. It was the last resting place of Major Tom, the alter ego who launched Bowie on his star-bound trajectory in 1969 with psychedelic epic Space Oddity. Musically, it was utterly astonishing, a 10-minute time-shifting, interstellar art rock, funk and jazz odyssey touching on execution, funeral rites, rituals and rebirth. “I am the great I am,” sang Bowie. “I’m a Blackstar.”

How could we have missed all the signs and portents? How was one of the world’s most adored stars able to orchestrate his own final act in such secrecy, leaving us all with the parting gift of a good death?

Blackstar is not a maudlin or sentimental album. It is probably as close as free jazz has got to pop, with Bowie’s words and melodies emerging from a sonic swamp of abstraction to sink their hooks in. It pulses with life, even if it is shot through with late-life melancholy.

In my original review in December 2015, I speculated about “how wonderful” it would be “if all of this actually represents an entirely new phase in Bowie’s extraordinary career.” I was told later that Bowie had read my review with some amusement. Apparently, my proclamation that he was embarking on a thrilling new phase had “made him laugh”.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]