I haven't met many famous people. The times I have were mostly accidents. There just seemed no possibility that the experience of anyone whose work I revered could come up to the work itself. I no more cared about their marital status than I did that of anyone in my street. So, why was I going to spend money and time on a day off to go and see not a famous person but his artefacts, boots, guitar picks, hankies. I am not that kind of fan.
Bowie was the one who took me out of the porridge of 70s mainstream with music that was as imaginative in sound as its stories were in concept. Halfway through the 70s there seemed a huge backlog and a few of us at school cobbled it together by the meagre few LPs available through record shops and the proto file sharing of cassettes. I wore out my music receptors numb with a tape of Ziggy Stardust one August holidays and still can't listen to it without psyching myself up. A predawn hearing of the spooky title track of Aladin Sane - "battle cries and champagne just in time for sunrise" - will always be with me. I passed the man who sold the world upon the stair and kept myself from the gaze of the Thin White Duke. I puzzled at the identity of the Bewlay Brothers and floated in the thick red air around Warszawa. I caught up around Station to Station but had the experience of all that went before it almost all at once. It was more like a film career than a music catalogue and by that I don't just mean movie star but auteur director. Bowie's world was the stuff of nightmare and glittering dream, the Hans Christian Andersen for the collapsing industrial landscape. I was a fan of that. So what was I doing going to gawp at the great man's shoelaces and bus tickets?
Well, first up, it's not all little bits. After you get your lanyard wifi player and headset and get immediately immersed in the soundscape of narration, Bowie interviews, vintage broadcasting that build an aural image of the man's origins. Before you get to the old wartime ration cards and kids comics the first exhibit is just outside the entrance. It's one of the iconic costumes, a striped vinyl bodysuit with the legs flattened and stretched to something between a cowboy and a sumo wrestler, contradicted by the supposedly slimming black and white lines. It stopped me.
First, Bowie is tall. I had assumed that this bastard who was good at everything he tried in public (except film acting) should by the balance of the universe be short. He really shouldn't have everything. But there it was, even as rolled out like the wylie coyote after yet another of his devices backfired on him, the costume of a tall, thin man. Second, he roamed a stage heated like a convection oven with massive lighting for hours at a time in this vinyl death trap. That's a lot of dedication for someone sold as a pop star.
And then once in, the immersion thickened and intensified. The childhood years were represented by the minutiae of the quotidian. This is where the little things are kept, the cards and tickets, but woven into them are signs that the kid that used these things had stars in his eyes and the will to light them in others. I was surprised to find myself fascinated.
As the young David Jones reaches adolescence and early attempts at breaking into public life there are vinyl 45s, publicity shots, letters to and between agents, managers and record company offices. One letter marks the name change from Jones to Bowie. It was to clear him of confusion with the singer from the Monkees. History guffaws at that now but then ...
Then the mime training begins and there video and testimony from Lindsay Kemp and it soon becomes clear that the costumes on mannequins, endless sketches for stage setups and gear, ideas on paper about cover art reveal just to what extent Bowie was involved in his own design. He might not have built the fascinating stage model for the proposed Orwell show but you can see his storyboard-like sketches that have a clear aesthetic unity to them. This is where my attention goes from interested to rivetted.
Basic but accurate charts for the string parts in Space Oddity, letters to collaborators, and lyric sheets on lined paper which, even those with a lot of edits indents and verse lines perfectly in line and the most legible cursive script I've seen since school. Of course this has been chosen for presentation and even those examples (like the wonderful two page draft of Heroes) which have extensive changes and notes-to-self express the kind of perspicacity I can recall abandoning in anything creative of my own back in my twenties. Bowie's sense of moment at his own creations comes through with less narcissism than industry; the guy worked at everything.
This concept is at the very centre of this exhibition. For all the costumes (and there are many, many costumes) and the lipstick-stained tissue (there's your hanky) the artefacts on the risers that show stations of the creative process and the determination (I include Brian Eno's oblique strategy cards as using them was a concrete decision) and deliberation in getting these things from notion to execution piece together the story of the guy who gave us a decade of solid work that retains its freshness, that can still delight and engage and frighten and fascinate.
Leaving the show, back out in the cooling spring weather, I didn't feel like listening to Bowie, I felt like drawing and playing, making new music.
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| Brian Eno's EMS Snythi, used on Low. There's a note from him to Bowie suggesting that he make a few mistakes with it. It's one of the last exhibits in the main gallery. The fact of it and the spirit of the note left me gawping. |
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