David Bowie
howard.male
A year on, what can be said about Blackstar that hasn’t been said already? The answer is: what I have to say about it. That’s not to claim any special insights, it’s simply because the artist designed it that way. Even though Bowie said not a word during the decade leading up to his death, the messages explicit, implicit and fancifully imagined were all there for the taking. One such message was the little blank notebook included with all the other paraphernalia in The Next Day Special Edition. Its blankness clearly said; there is no cohesive meaning to this record other than the one you Read more ...
edward.seckerson
When David Bowie first met with the producer Robert Fox to discuss Lazarus back in 2013, you now have to wonder if he was seriously contemplating his own mortality. The clue, of course, lies in the title, and that of Bowie's extraordinary last album, Blackstar. In what is effectively a sequel to the Walter Tevis novel The Man Who Fell to Earth – memorably filmed by Nicholas Roeg with Bowie as the marooned alien Thomas Newton – Lazarus is awash with intimations of death, of decay, of a world on the brink of extinction.Enda Walsh's book is full of longing – for love, for peace, Read more ...
Alison Cole
David Bowie needs no introduction, yet he kept one aspect of his life largely hidden away: his art collecting. Now Sotheby’s, which is auctioning off around 400 items of his private art collection in a three-part sale on 10 and 11 November, is holding a very special exhibition, lasting just 10 days. The exhibition and the extensive catalogues that accompany the sale provide an exceptional opportunity to see the works together before they are dispersed and to look at how much the collection reflects the man (and sometimes his music).As you would expect from someone of Bowie’s range of burning Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“I’m here, I’m here, I’m here,” sang John Cale in the droning voice of Major Tom. Whether the spirit of David Bowie was indeed hovering over the Albert Hall for this impromptu memorial late-night Prom is not easily answered. The shape-shifting Bowie who stayed ahead of the game was honoured in a set lasting nearly two hours and covering 47 years of music-making from 1969 to 2016. But anyone hoping to catch a spacemobile back to 1973 was not to be humoured. Those who turned up with lighting-bolt faces should have been warned: this ain’t rock’n’roll, this is contemporary classical.The set was Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
From the late Eighties to the early 2000s, Iggy Pop turned out a succession of sassy rock albums that ranged in quality but usually contained a greasy, dirt-ingrained gem or three. These albums appeared with a garage-punk lack of self-consciousness, doing the rock’n’roll job like a lifer born to it. More recently, however, when not in Stooges mode, the Ig has gone adventuring. He made a couple of albums themed around jazz and French chanson and his latest is also a statement album. It’s a timely one too for Post Pop Depression takes its cue from the two fantastic albums Pop made with David Read more ...
Mary Finnigan
This extract from Mary Finnigan’s book Psychedelic Suburbia describes events leading up to the creation of the Beckenham Arts Lab, during the early period after David moved into her flat in Foxgrove Road, Beckenham in April 1969. The book was published by Jorvik Press on 8 January 2016 – three days before David died in New York. In early May, Hutch comes to stay for a few days and adds the dimension of his refined guitar skill to David’s compositions. David can strum to useful effect, but he has not learned to finger pick.I never get to know Hutch well, but on first impression he seems to be Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
That purveyor of everything from crazy cosmic jive and plastic soul to epic disco and elegant Berlin ambient gloom made a hell of an exit last week. His last release, his “parting gift” Blackstar, was a dazzling curtain bow unlike any other. He was a brilliant magpie, smuggling all kinds of ideas from Kabuki and Nietzsche to avant-jazz and cut-ups into impeccable, usually subversive, pop. Whether you saw him as a “major liberator” (Jon Savage) or were put off by the “smorgasbord of lachrymosity" (Julie Burchill), in the past week it became clear how many different types of people's lives Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 1994 the art magazine Modern Painters invited fresh blood onto its editorial board. The new intake included a novelist, William Boyd, and a rock star, David Bowie. "That’s how I got to know him," says Boyd. "We’d sit at the table with all these art critics and art experts feeling like new boys slightly having to prove ourselves. He interviewed Balthus, he interviewed Tracey Emin. He wrote for the magazine effectively."But there was another contribution made by Bowie (who was privately a painter, collector and autodidactic connoisseur), and as a story it was still running four years ago. In Read more ...
theartsdesk
If each man's death diminishes us, we're all about a foot shorter today. When Elvis Presley died, his manager Colonel Tom Parker said "this won't change anything!", and he promptly set about ensuring his client's immortality by turning him into a production line of merchandise and memorabilia. This won't happen to David Bowie, because he had already seized control of his own myth. It will continue to be felt indefinitely in his influence on music, video, art and the the nature of stardom itself.Anyone who thought Bowie had made his last big artistic statement will have been confounded by the Read more ...
joe.muggs
He knew.18 months of dealing with cancer, and rather than withdraw and rest – as he'd done before – David Bowie knuckled down made a record as intense and disturbing as anything he's done before. The Next Day was a worthy return to the fray but Blackstar... Even before we heard the terrible news, just taken on its own merits, Blackstar was something else. And now, knowing that he knew, it's absolutely fearsome in its confrontation with death.I know something is very wrongThe pulse returns the prodigal sonsThe blackout hearts, the flowered newsWith skull designs upon my shoes(“Can't Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The 100 Club is dark. Really dark. People are shrouded in the ink-light. I think it’s to save their embarrassment as they order a drink and realise they’ll have to either apply for a loan or sell a child in order to get drunk. In any case, the indoor gloaming provides the perfect setting for the opening act of the evening, Demian Castellanos. The creative helm of psych-rock act The Oscillation, he's on his own tonight with a wordless solo set showcasing new material.Starting off with tones and drones, Castellanos doesn’t so much create a mood as conjure up musical weather. There’s a gadget Read more ...
theartsdesk
In the arts there is never a best of anything. There is good, great and glorious. But best? There is, however, Stop Making Sense. Talking Heads invited the director Jonathan Demme to film them in performance over three nights in December 1983 at Pantages Theater in Hollywood. The result is (arguably) the greatest concert movie ever made. And the good news, as a restored version is released on disc, is that time has not diminished its greatness, any more than it has shrunk the outsize suit David Byrne wears for “Girlfriend Is Better”, which if anything looks bigger in an era free from shoulder Read more ...