davidbowie.de

David Bowie and Ricky Gervais

Ricky Gervais, creator of The Office and stand-up comedian, interviews pop icon David Bowie, covering what it means to be a fan, the difference between Iggy Pop and Will Young ('about seven inches'), the nature of reality and the prospect of 'buggering off to Tibet'.

Sunday September 21, 2003
The Observer

RG: What's caught your eye in music in the last year?
DB: Dandy Warhol put out yet another fine album this year. For all their druggy stance, they're very single minded, consistently interesting and focused I find. I've got them as the support band on my tour this year. Whenever (lead singer) Courtney walks into the room I want to put beads on. I haven't felt like that since 1967.
Grandaddy was a little disappointing I thought. Too many tracks with the same weight and drive I think, but a pleasant album. The new Macy Gray is great, she's really back on form. Blur astonished, didn't they? What a first class piece of work 'Think Tank' was. Excellent writing and beautifully played. I saw them in New York a month or so ago and thought the show wonderful. Damon is a superb front man. Nice suit. Looked like Agnes B. but maybe not. The suit I mean, not Damon. Radiohead took first prize for performance though. The show at the Beacon theater was astounding. Not sure about the album 'Hail', though. I find I'm not playing it as much as some of their others. Another stella performance this year was Lou Reed. I loved the stripped down band. Less is more. It gave him room to talk and he weaves a lovely anecdote.
RG: Both the new album and current tour are called "reality". Why is that, and do you think a man like yourself can keep the same reality as the rest of us or didn't you have that in the first place?
DB: 'Reality' was among the first tracks that I wrote for this album and the word itself seemed a reasonable simulacrum for the various topics on the album. A bit of an arbitrary choice really. Of course, the reality thing is completely subjective.
It's all very well for those of us with an excess of cable channels to talk of no absolutes and synthetic realities and such, but some poor bod in South London with no rent money and not enough food to feed his family has a pretty good idea of what reality means to him.
RG: What's the point of what you do?
DB: To avoid boredom. And to express my disgust at a hostile but indifferent ... No, that was what I said in 1968. To avoid boredom, then.
RG: When you were starting out, where did you imagine you'd be in thirty years? How accurate was your prediction.?
DB: I presumed I'd be dead. So I was pretty accurate for a few of years there. I did figure at one point that I'd be likely to throw in the towel at around forty and bugger off to Tibet. Well, Northumberland anyway. I knew though that I'd have a huge catalogue of songs, as I've never been able to stop writing.
RG: Where do you think you'll be in thirty years?
DB: I really don't look that far, Ricky. Though towards the end of this year I'll be in Glasgow.
RG: There is definitely no God. Discuss.
DB: Which God are we talking about here? The frightening one in the Old Testament or the loving fatherly one who suddenly appears in the New book. Or maybe one of the Indian ones? I think the chances are that a God both does and doesn't exist. That sounds the most plausible probability to me.
RG: What do you think of programmes like Pop Idol and Fame Academy, that let off new stars like nail bombs?
DB: Absolute garbage. A nadir with seemingly endless high ratings.
RG: What's the difference between you and Gareth, Iggy and Will, or Reed and Sneddon?
DB: The difference between Iggy and Will? About seven inches from what I've heard. Iggy's quite short, you see? Stop sniggering in the back.
RG: Does David Jones still exist anywhere and would he recognise you?
DB: I will always be fundamentally just a Jones. The moment I close the door behind me, slip off my crushed velvet skateboard shorts and throw myself into our heated Olympic size, three level swimming pool, I think to myself, 'Self, is there a Jones next door that I should be keeping up with?' And do you know something? There always is. Though actually it's the Prestons in our case but you know what I mean.
RG: You have been my favourite artist for most of my life and one of the reasons I never worried about having crooked teeth and was because they were just like yours. Then you got yours done. Do you feel guilty?
DB: Not even a flutter.
RG: Which is the best Bowie album and why? Is that the same as your favourite?
DB: My best album is, of course, my new one, Reality. No question. No brainer. Without doubt my best since, oh, Scary Monsters probably. My favourite is still Buddha of Suburbia. I really felt happy making that album. Overall, it was just myself and Erdel Kizilcay working on that. Erdel was a fellow musician, Turkish, who lived and worked in Switzerland. He had studied at an Istanbul Conservatory of Music, a bit like Juilliard from what I can gather. For his degree he had to become proficient on every instrument in the orchestra. This led to a lot of testing on my part. I would produce an oboe from my jacket pocket. 'Hey, Erdel, don't you think oboe would be nice here?'
He would trot off to the mike and put down a fluent and beautiful solo then say, 'That's quite good but how about if I doubled it with the North Albanian Frog Trembler? And he would. I would seethe, as I would have placed bets on his not being able to play such and such an instrument with our engineer. I never once was able to catch him out. The album itself got only one review, a good one as it happens, and is virtually non-existent as far as my catalogue goes. As it accompanied the TV play of the same name, it was designated as a soundtrack by the record company and got zilch in the way of marketing money. A real shame, I thought. It has to be my favourite though. That and Reality, of course.
RG: If you had to make a choice, would you write songs for other people and never sing another note, or perform other people's songs and never write another note?
DB: So many of your questions require a this or that answer. Tick the applicable box. Did you fail a lot of driving tests? Oh, that might be an American joke...
RG: Do you think art has a social responsibility?
DB: Not as far as Paul Simon is concerned. But there was another Art much nearer to my heart. Art Wood. And yes, he was Ronnie's older brother. He was one of the first London musicians to popularise R&B. He worked for a while with Alexis Korner and would play clubs like Hampstead's Klooks Kleek (say that fast). He eventually formed his own band called logically 'The Artwoods'. You wouldn't know it now but they were probably one of the most popular live bands in London, right up there with the Yardbirds, Zoot Money and John Mayall. But, for fun, there was no beating Red Hoffman and the Measles. One of the great unsung r&b bands of the mid-sixties. I was always finding myself on the same bill as 'Red' or Stan as he became after a few drinks. We'd kick a football around on the floor of the club before the audience came in. Just two boys, jackets as goal posts, Mum calls, 'Your tea's ready'. An enduring image.
RG: Special AKA sang Free Nelson Mandela and Hey Pesto... 6 years later he was out. Do you think you could've released a single that would've sprung him sooner? Is it true you're the only famous person who hasn't met him?
DB: You've got your facts a little skewwiff here, Rick. In October of 1989 Tin Machine released the single 'Prisoner Of Love' and exactly four months later Nelson walked free. I think that tells the story, no?
As for meeting him, somebody looking remarkably like me accompanied my wife to South Africa in 1992 and, having queued up behind Naomi and various other political notables, was introduced to the future Nobel Prize Winner (no, not Naomi etc.) and shook his hand and was given a signed book.. I've seen the pictures. I have the book. A very tall man. And Mr. Mandela is no short arse either.
RG: Before I even heard your new album I knew it was a brilliant and inspiring piece of work that reflects the fact that you are not only the greatest living rock star but also a handsome intelligent man. With that in mind what do you think of my new stand up DVD released November 17th?
DB: It will never be off my record player. Why does your DVD stand up? Has it a supportive base of some kind. Won't that make it jolly hard to file along with Kenneth Williams, Max Miller and the other 'comedy' DVD's.
I too have a supportive base, actually. They've bought all my records for years now. I'd never be without them. Now I understand your thinking.
RG: What do you think of these questions?
DB: (Long Pause) Well? I'm still waiting.

Zitat

David Bowie and Ricky Gervais

...
RG: Which is the best Bowie album and why? Is that the same as your favourite?
DB: My best album is, of course, my new one, Reality. No question. No brainer. Without doubt my best since, oh, Scary Monsters probably. My favourite is still Buddha of Suburbia. I really felt happy making that album.
.... and is virtually non-existent as far as my catalogue goes. As it accompanied the TV play of the same name, it was designated as a soundtrack by the record company and got zilch in the way of marketing money. 
....

In the middle of a mild New York City winter, Bowie took a break from his hectic schedule (in addition to his Web site, he has two albums planned for release in 1999, and he will ring in the millennium at New Zealand's Gisborne 2000 festival) to sit down with Y-Life and discuss fame, fashion, technology, and how it feels to be the man who sold the world an Internet provider.

DAVID BOWIE: Good morning. I'm just having my morning coffee.
Y-LIFE: It certainly is early.
BOWIE: I've been up for quite a long time, actually. Both my wife and I get up at 6 o'clock or something like that, which destroys my other musicians. [Laughs]
Y-LIFE: Let's talk about how you started the BowieNet site, and your interest in the Internet.
BOWIE: It was a confluence of things. My interest began back in the early '90s, with friends who were already into doing design on the computer. I really got quite excited about what you could do visually. By '93, I was starting to work with early Photoshop and Painter [imaging software] to do my prints and design based on my paintings. I would scan them in and manipulate them. At the same time, a Silicon Valley friend, who was interested in the way I wrote lyrics -which was primarily based on the William Burroughs cut-up method- suggested that he could come up with a little program that could do the same thing I do, but much quicker, and gave me a far greater variety of output. He did that, and I started using that on a computer. And my son [Duncan] was also into this. He was online before anyone. I would join in and watch what he was doing and get fairly excited about it. I also started to see the abundance of Bowie sites and all that.
Y-LIFE: How old is your son?
BOWIE: He's coming up to 28 now.
Y-LIFE: So he's the perfect age for the Net.
BOWIE: Yeah, really. He really started with games in the '80s. He's so totally fluent. He's done a lot of programming when he was taking a break from university, programmed for BowieNet. He's quite a techhead. I'm not.
Y-LIFE: A lot of musicians came to the Web as a way to reach their fans. But you came in through other art projects. Were you aware of other official sites by pop-music artists?
BOWIE: Yes. I've been through nearly everybody's sites.
Y-LIFE: Are there some sites that you looked at as models or cautionary tales?
BOWIE: Not really one overall site. I liked the look of the Prodigy site [the band, not the online service -Ed.]. I thought the design was very good. On the other hand, we went off very much on out own when we got down to doing the graphics for our site. I wanted the look of it based primarily on the kind of deconstructed look I had on the album Outside, in 1994- working on the idea of broken graphics and that kind of feel. I already got a bit of a jump start, in that my background was visual arts.
Y-LIFE: Have you been to the Artist's site?
BOWIE: Yeah. It's good.
Y-LIFE: You probably know that he and Todd Rundgren and some other artists have started to use the Net to distribute their music.
BOWIE: We haven't really gone gung ho on selling things online. It's not what I wanted to do. I much more wanted a community, more of an interactive thing. That's why I pushed and promoted the idea of feedback. I ask questions of the users, just as the users ask questions of me, contribute their own ideas, their own visuals, and their own ideas for text. That, for me at the moment, is much more important.
Y-LIFE: How often are you on the site?
BOWIE: I go on daily. Because I get up so early, I can put in at least half an hour daily.
Y-LIFE: Nothing on TV?
BOWIE: I can't stand TV. The only thing I miss when I come to New York is that in Bermuda, where I live, I can get ZDTV [the television network affiliated with ZD Inc., this magazine's parent company. -Ed.]. I can't get it over here.
Y-LIFE: You really watch ZDTV in Bermuda?
BOWIE: Yes. [Laughs] Isn't that terrible?
Y-LIFE: You should get a show.
BOWIE: I used to watch CNN. CNN was, like, on all day. Now I just leave it on ZDTV and see what's happening out there.
Y-LIFE: On your site, you sponsored a songwriting contest in which you wrote a melody and invited fans to write lyrics for it. The winner gets his or her lyrics recorded. Isn't that unprecedented?
BOWIE: Yes, I think so. Unfortunately there were thousands of entries.
Y-LIFE: Did you read them all?
BOWIE: I had to postpone the finish date, because I just couldn't get through them.
Y-LIFE: Have you gotten tired of that melody yet?
BOWIE: Oh, tell me about it. [Laughs] I'm not sure if I'll do it again. Not quite in this way. I'm sure we'll find some other interesting avenues. But this contest was really quite tiring.
Y-LIFE: There have been other projects like that. For example, the Stones had a thing where fans visiting their web site picked a song for the band to play each night.
BOWIE: Yeah, well, U did that in 1990 on the Sound + Vision tour.
Y-LIFE: Online?
BOWIE: No, not online. But with e-mail, because my whole production office was on e-mail. We would have the sets dictated to us through e-mail.
Y-LIFE: You also publish your own diaries online on BowieNet. You've done journalism before, of course, but now you have your own electronic press.
BOWIE: I also have a hard-print house, called 21 Publishing. We feature mainly art books. I've written intros for those. I also contribute on a regular basis to a magazine called Modern Painting. And to some of the British newspapers. I do write a lot. I'm liking it more and more the older I get.
Y-LIFE: The diary topics are pretty broad. You write about meeting your wife, or herbal cold remedies. This seems to be an effective way for stats to get beyond celebrity, to demystify themselves.
BOWIE: The advent of demystification is very strong. It started in the late '80s, and it's really coming to the fore now. Musically, there's no particular group or artist coming to the fore, but rather genres: hip-hop, or female singers. That seems to be the sound and the feel of the '90s, rather than a Beatles or a Stones or a Prince. It's not personality-led.
Y-LIFE: Why do you think that is?
BOWIE: It’s the way we're evolving. I think the Net is partly responsible. It acknowledges that fact, and that's how we're dealing with individuals and information and cult charisma and all that crap.
Y-LIFE: Who would ever thing you would come out for demystification?
BOWIE: I've never really put myself out there as a person. I've developed characters. I've been more interested in the process: what an artist is, what a star is. Much of what I do is taking apart and analyzing and re-representing.
Y-LIFE: But most people know you through your characters, and the character on the site is closer to the actual person.
BOWIE: On the other hand, I probably would be the first person to do that. If you're totally into process, I think that's eventually where you get to.
Y-LIFE: So it's a mask that looks exactly like you this time.
BOWIE: [Laughs and lapses into a radio-announcer voice] This is the real me.
Y-LIFE: You admit on the site that your famous '70s diaries were written by someone else, as part of the Ziggy Stardust experiment. You've said that once you created a persona, you would hand him over to other people to manage for a time. But these bowieNet diaries are real?
BOWIE: Yeah, yeah. These are for real.
Y-LIFE: Are there eyewitness accounts of you typing? Or is it dictating?
BOWIE: I type very well. My spelling is atrocious, but I have a spell-checker. Actually I'm often tempted to leave the checker's corrections of words in, because they're much funnier.
Y-LIFE: There's cut-up for you.
BOWIE: "Damned hirsute" is "Damien Hirst" [an artist whom Bowie has supported for many years -Ed.]. No, that's completely my job. Anything you see on the site, if it's supposed to be me, it's actually me.
Y-LIFE: So people can see into your private life and pick up these weird, mundane details.
BOWIE: It's unprecedented, but I think it's fabulously instructive in its own way- not about the personalities themselves, but about how personality works. I don't think it's for everybody. I think there are a lot of people who would be quite scared of the act of revealing themselves.
Y-LIFE: Are there any other stars you'd like so see writing online diaries?
BOWIE: Dylan.
Y-LIFE: Can you imagine?
BOWIE: No. [Laughs] Also Iggy Pop. But I always thought he'd be a damned good straight-prose writer if he got down to it. I just don't think he'd bother, which is unfortunate. He'd be really good. Of the new school, Trent [Reznor]'s already in there and running. He has quite a lot of foresight. Let's stop there.
Y-LIFE: Do you buy records?
BOWIE: Of course.
Y-LIFE: Online? Or do you just walk into a record store, like a normal person?
BOWIE: For many, many years -at least the last 15 years- I have led a very informal and natural lifestyle, inasmuch as I don't have an entourage. I don't work like that. I do go shopping. I make sure that I'm not imprisoned.
Y-LIFE: On the subject of online delivery: You've been in the music business for 30-plus years. When you look 10 years into the future, what do you see?
BOWIE: I think the whole way of delivering music will change. But I go against the flow. I think most people consider that corporations will continue to crush the idea of .MP3. What in fact they will do -there is a reason that they remain corporations for such a long time, because they have teeth-gnashing survival instincts- is that they'll work out their own way of delivering their own form of .MP3 into the stores themselves. I don't think stores will disappear. People like contact to a certain extent. I think it will be split fairly equally between online and store buying. Store buying will change. There won't be packaging.
Y-LIFE: So stores will stock blanks?
BOWIE: Exactly. You'll burn a CD with a selection of preselected tracks.
Y-LIFE: And the art can come from color laser printers.
BOWIE: Absolutely. You'll have a selection of artwork. That's what we're trying to do with our site liveandwell.com [www.liveandwell.com]: present a template of how this might work [the liveandwell.com project aims to create the first online virtual CD -Ed.]. You pick what you want as artwork and text, print it out, staple it together, and put it in the jewel box.
Y-LIFE: And that's OK with you? What about the part of every artist that's a control freak and wants to dictate what finds its way into the hands of readers, viewers, or listeners?
BOWIE: Well, I think ever since the day bootlegs started, you had to let go of that control to a certain extent. There's such a democratic spirit about the whole thing. I only find it exciting.
Y-LIFE: Seventeen years ago or so, with the advent of MTV, artists had to make the choice whether or not to join this new medium. Some did, some didn't. At the time, you had been making videos for a while. Did you know what a force MTV would become?
BOWIE: I only thought it would have a certain power because, again, having some visual background, I was aware of how strong the visual image is. I don't think and of us knew what impact it would have.
Y-LIFE: Do you think the Net's going to be as powerful as that?
BOWIE: Oh, god, yes. I think we are undergoing a most enormous eruption, a revolution. This is for real. It will change everything that we know- absolutely everything.
Y-LIFE: You've also predicted that the future will be all about wearable computers.
BOWIE: I can't wait.
Y-LIFE: You're going to preorder?
BOWIE: Can you imagine the terrible, nasty things we'll be asked to wear? We'll all look like Devo.
Y-LIFE: The last thing I want to talk about is the part of the Net devoted to gossip and rumor.
BOWIE: Oh, I never read that. [Laughs]
Y-LIFE: You've been the subject of a lot of gossip through the years. For the last decade you've been living relatively normally, as you said. But let's say the Internet in this form had existed in 1974.
BOWIE: Oh, my god.
Y-LIFE: You'd have logged onto Cybersleaze, and read all these rumors about yourself....
BOWIE: Yeah. Well, it's human nature. No change from the fifteenth century to the seventeenth century to now. Gossip has always been a way that people have assessed their moral station in life. People say "So-and-so has done this," and they get a reaction from the person they're telling it to, and then they gauge their own reaction. It's a way of finding out the moral temperature.
Y-LIFE: So today your biographers, both authorized and unauthorized, would be online.
I think most of it's online, anyway.
Y-LIFE: Including your own site- you seem to have the instincts of a pack rat.
BOWIE: I have so much stuff, it's unbelievable. Even in my out-of-my-nut stages, I seem to have not thrown anything away. I probably have more than anybody else around- if that definitive book would ever come out. I think it's much more likely that I'll end up archiving it completely on the Net. Just assemble the stuff that's collected over the years.
Y-LIFE: Like a presidential library- but for rock stars.
BOWIE: I wonder if Bill Gates would pay $30 million for the original lyrics to "Space Oddity." Hmmm. Didn't he pay that for the Codex Leicester [a notebook of Leonardo da Vinci's that Gates bought for $30.8 million in 1994 -Ed.]?
Y-LIFE: If you tell him that the lyric is older than it is, maybe. He probably doesn't know.
BOWIE: [Laughs] Being a Mac person, I'm in full agreement with you.

An interview with David Bowie and Brian Eno from Time Out, August 23-30 1995, conducted by Dominic Wells

BE: What I think is happening there is it removes from the artist the responsibility of being the 'meaner' - the person who means to say this and is trying to get it over to you - and puts him in the position of being the interpreter.

DB: It's almost as if things have turned from the beginning of this century where the artist reveals a truth, to the artist revealing the complexity of a question, saying, 'Here's the bad news, the question is even more complicated than you thought.' Often it happens on acid I suppose - if I remember! - you realise the absolute incomprehensible situation that we're in... (Bowie, who has been gesturing with dangerous animation, knocks an ashtray full of chain-smoked Marlboros on to the carpet) ... like this kind of chaos! (Eno kneels to sweep up the ash and butts from Bowie's feet) Why are you doing that, Brian? That's immensely big of you.

BE: Just so you can finish your sentence.

DB: I didn't need to. I illustrated it! (Hilarity) The randomness of the everyday event. If we realised how incredibly complex our situation was, we'd just die of shock.

(There follows a good 20 minutes of discussion about Bosnia, how morality is an outdated concept which should be replaced simply with the law; and how sex and violence are not gratuitous, but forces our human nature compels us to explore.) 

danke chakora fürs nochmal raussuchen.

*seufz* das von sydney is heute genau ein Jahr alt