Friday On My Mind #4: From Central Park to Shantytown, changing at Berlin.

It's No Game (part 1) - (Scary Monsters and Super Creeps)
So our man and his band of faithful retainers (Messrs. Visconti, Eno, Fripp, Alomar et al) have just made three odd albums full of weird sounds, throwing pop music convention up in the air, picking it up off the floor and putting it all back together the wrong way around. On the Scary Monsters album, though, Bowie is back in the mainstream, recording in London and New York and leaving Berlin behind (for the moment).

So does that mean he's back to playing nice? Does it fuck. This track is Bowie at his most uncompromising, growling his litany of defiance while Michi Hirota spits out invective in Japanese and Robert Fripp strangles the life out of an electric guitar. "SHUT UP!" bellows our beloved artiste at the end, while machines wheeze and grind and run down around him. Then straight into the elliptical, oblique pop of Up The Hill Backwards and you're not quite sure what you've bought.

Interestingly, some of this tune is a reworking of one of David Bowie's earliest ever compositions: a tune called Tired Of My Life that he wrote when he was 16. The whole "put a bullet in my brain / and it makes all the papers" section is pretty much lifted from there. Tired Of My Life was evidently in the running for the Man Who Sold The World album, because a later demo of it turns up on the Missinglinksoneziggy bootleg. So is Bowie just recycling old teenage angst out of desperation, or is it just that he has a talent for bringing old sketches back to life and giving them meaning in a new context?

Scary Monsters is certainly a strong record, precisely because (once again) the singer completely confounds expectations throughout. And It's No Game is a brave introduction to an album that's difficult and problematic, but it also seems to be a favourite with a lot of fans. SM(ASC) has definitely improved over time; but its initial promise was never fulfilled: the 80s were a period of creative inertia for a lot of artists, and it turned out Bowie was no exception. (Though, to be fair, he always seemed to turn out sterling work on outside projects like the Absolute Beginners movie or the Baal TV play; it was just David Bowie the label-bound recording artist who hit a creative lull.)

Don't Look Down - Tonight
So Iggy Pop had just made two albums with Bowie helping out, The Idiot and Lust For Life. Great records both of them, but a long way from The Stooges. His 1979 album, New Values, saw him reunited with James Williamson - not an original Stooge, more a later-stage interloper, but a fine guitarist and co-writer, and a pretty good musical foil - a Ronson to Iggy's Bowie, if you like. After Raw Power, Pop and Williamson had collaborated on the promising but only half-finished Kill City while Iggy was an outpatient. Williamson didn't actually do much guitar playing on the New Values album, but he did co-write this with Iggy and the original is a decent piece of work: poppy and accessible, with some nice grinding guitar, but still full of guts and heart. Listening back to the original, it's the sort of hummable guitar groove that wouldn't have sounded out of place on Big Star's Radio City. Bowie's cover, on the other hand, is insipid and uninspiring.

Maybe it seemed like a good idea (at the time) to take a short, snappy, rocky guitar song and try to do it as a lovers rock tune. Reggae was flavour of the "month" in the mid 80s, which meant that a lot of great music got exposure in the UK pop charts, but it also meant that a lot of third-rate, ersatz imitators jumped on board the bandwagon for a ride. The backing track on Bowie's version is smooth, slickly played and entirely inconsequential and I'm sorry, lover's rock is not meant to sound like that. It's meant to sound pretty but not poncey. Romantic but maybe just a little bit rude.

It's a shame that an ex-mod from South London with a lifelong passion and respect for black music couldn't have done a better job of this, is all. This is one of three Iggy Pop covers on the album, and Bowie also duets with Iggy on a number they co-wrote called Dancing With The Big Boys which is so forgettable I actually had to look up the title. And the moral of the story is: avoid Tonight like the plague, especially if you're a David Bowie fan, because by all appearances he's barely involved in the making of it. You don't believe me? You want me to tell you about the Beach Boys cover? Take my word for it.

(In all fairness, Tonight does contain the single Blue Jean, which was a perfectly agreeable pop song, and a very inventive long-form video you can find easily enough hanging around at YouTube. Not a classic tune by any means, but on this album it stands out like a diamond from dross. Buy it on a compilation instead.)

Subterraneans - Low
The three of us assembled in the music room where Dusty got one together. He'd assembled skins and a bit of a cigarette box for roach, and he was frantically cooking hash and crumbling it onto tobacco on top of the piano keys. The lid poised right over his hand in case a priest stuck his head around the door. Spanky, the California kid who'd been sent over by his family for a year in an Irish boarding school, kept nervous lookout. Owly, a priest with a booming voice and a menacing walk, was "on" tonight, and we only had a twenty-minute window in which we could skin up, have a smoke, and get back inside in time for the second evening study period.

I was the day boy. It was my job to get the cigs and papers. I didn't even bother asking who Dusty had got the hash from, everything was hush-hush and cloak and dagger, don't-ask-don't-tell. In any event, he put the whole thing together adequately, licked the papers shut with a flourish, poked in a rolled-up bit of roach with a matchstick, stuck the thing behind his ear and out we went, unmenaced by Owly, up the hill to the handball alleys at the back of the school.

The moon was fat and creamy, waxing gibbous, and the walls of the alleys made odd, angular shadows. Dusty lit up and passed the first blast around; it was good resiny tasting Afghan Black and he'd put plenty in. "You know," he said, "I'd love to get a tape machine, bring it up here and play something deadly, like Dark Side of the Moon or fuckin' the second side of Low. "For sure," said Spanky in his long California drawl. He very rarely came out with anything other than some mumble of vague assent, like "for sure" or "far out". It went without saying: we were all Bowie fans. Dusty'd been a prog-rock fan before he got into the Ramones; I'd liked prog and some metal before I'd heard The Saints and Television; Spanky loved the Eagles and all that American FM stuff but was pretty much up for anything. We all agreed on Floyd, Dylan and Bowie.

I started half-singing a minor melody from one of the songs of the second side of Low; I forgot which one. Dusty joined in on the wordless syllables: "So-la-mee, ee-lay-ho..." Which one was that again? "Warszawa", he said, trying his best to pronounce it like a Slav with vees instead of doubleyous and a chewy bit in the middle. "My favourite track is Subterraneans, though." "Shelly shelly shelly owm..." He took a deep toke and passed it on to Spanky. "That's what the whole album was about, you know. The Subterraneans." The spliff came around to me. "You listen to that song and you can almost see them," Dusty continued, well into a nice hash reverie. "You can see their eyes. He puts it so well you don't need words that mean anything."

You know, he had a point, and it seemed even more credible standing there in those handball alleys late at night thirty years ago, turning on, with the moon casting crazy shadows and every step or shuffle creating some weird echo somewhere else. The shadows swam with the likenesses of those left behind, forgotten people passing through the basements and the U-bahns of some faraway city, with hollow eyes and whispery voices. Forget those glittery alien rock-star myths, it really did seem right then as though Bowie was giving a voice to those forgotten people. Even today, some thirty years later, I can still almost see those faces when I hear the song, humming along with that slow ascending bassline, wondering if that's the sound of the subterraneans slowly making their way up into the light.

Myself and Dusty both went on to play in bands; we met up by accident at some record business do in Dublin years later. Spanky went back home to the US at the end of the school year and we never heard from him again. Owly became principal of the school a few years later, after we'd gone, and ended up leaving the church and marrying his housekeeper. They had kids and everything. By all accounts he's still a bollocks, though.