Blackstar Theory: The Last Works of David Bowie: 2 (Ex:Centrics)

Product Information

Cold Lazarus (Channel 4/BBC, 1996), was, along with its twin production Karaoke, Potter’s last work, written as he was dying from pancreatic cancer and produced after his death in 1994. About the author: Leah Kardos is a senior lecturer in music at Kingston University London, UK, where she co-founded the Visconti Studio with music producer Tony Visconti. She specialises in the areas of record production, pop aesthetics and criticism, and exploring interdisciplinary approaches to creative practice.

CO: He had on call a singer as good as Gail Ann Dorsey but he chose to do all the vocals himself, for the most part right? He used [engineer] Erin Tonkon for a few things. 8 The book explores the swirl of themes that orbit and entangle these projects from a starting point in musical analysis and features new interviews with key collaborators from the period: producer Tony Visconti, graphic designer Jonathan Barnbrook, musical director Henry Hey, saxophonist Donny McCaslin and assistant sound engineer Erin Tonkon. Leah and I spoke via Zoom in early December—the following is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Abstract

One of my conclusions about it is that it works best when you consider it as assemblage art, like the key is not only seeing what it resembles, but also seeing the various parts and remnants that comprise it, the bolts and screws and seams, the proximities of everything. I found an interview with Tony Oursler where he said he and Bowie were involved with the V&A exhibition, they were involved with planning it, and Jonathan Barnbrook also confirmed [Bowie] had his hand in it. So you can add the V&A to the pile of Next Day and Next Day Extra: he was giving us a lot of information in a deliberately impersonal arrangement. An invitation to participate and construct something meaningful from the bits and pieces. One can really sense his directorial hand in all of it, the ‘David Bowie Is…’ question being explored on all sides. LK: I’d agree and I love the presence of Donny as being something like Bowie’s emotional avatar, not vying for equal billing, but supplying a musical commentary underneath Bowie’s vocal performance. And it really articulates something: the solo on “Lazarus,” the way it dramatizes a song which on paper is quite simple. The soling on “I Can’t Give Everything Away” also. It reaches towards those inexpressible things, the unsayable stuff. And I’m so glad the last song didn’t end up being “Heat.” CO: I’m curious if it will survive as a piece of drama, if it could be staged in 2070, when few people will still have memories of David Bowie while he was alive. Or will it have a short life? I still find Lazarus hard to grapple with. It’s the closest I ever felt to seeing how Bowie’s mind worked, being able to peep in on his thought processes. Like someone recounting a dream to you. Ormen is also a village in Norway, the country where Bowie’s old girlfriend, Hermione Farthingale, went in 1969 to appear in the film Song of Norway about the composer Edvard Grieg – and from the musical play by someone going by the name Milton Lazarus. Bowie wore a T-shirt bearing the film’s name in the video to 2013’s similarly reflective Where We Are Now?. Others think Bowie is playing with language: one Reddit poster says “in the villa of Ormen” sounds like “the revealer of all men”, ie death. Love is Lost (Hello Steve Reich Mix by James Murphy for the DFA – Edit)’ is available to stream on YouTube.

When explaining the genesis of the Lazarus script, co-writer Enda Walsh told the Financial Times that the pair ‘began to talk about death … about morphine. How the brain would wrestle with itself or what it would see in the moments before death. [Bowie said:] “Can we structure something about that?”.’ They talked about the psychotherapeutic noir of Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective and Bob Fosse’s cinematic ode to mortality All That Jazz (1979). ‘We discussed drugs and the drunken state a lot. How to construct something and place it behind the eyes of someone who is totally out of it. The film [Roeg’s adaptation] does it so brilliantly. We thought, we can do that on stage, too’. CO: He was never much of an archival guy, musically—getting demos and outtakes from him for reissues was like pulling teeth at times. The idea of him doing a Dylan Bootleg Series is unlikely. CO: I’m glad it’s being staged more. At first, it was just this two-month off-Broadway run in this small theater, so it felt like a secret thing that lot of fans didn’t know about because they couldn’t see it. The missing piece of the puzzle.

Choose Display Mode

CO: It’s amazing to think of Bowie sitting there going “am I past it? Do the kids not want to hear from me anymore?” Bye Bye Life’ finale sequence from All That Jazz. 1979. Directed by Bob Fosse. 20th Century Fox. All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979) What a feast of thoughts and interpretations we have been awarded by this amazing man, I am so grateful to DB for the continuing fun. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. 1920. Directed by Robert Wiene. Decla Film. Sketch of ‘somnambulist for Lazarus video’ – David Bowie

CO: Does the last work need to be the last work? Does it lose its power if Bowie lives five more years and makes two more records? Dr. Kardos’ point about Bowie camouflaging his compositional adventurousness with claims of non-musicianship is encapsulated by one anecdote Bowie related in, I think, the 1987 cover interview in Stone where he recounts suggesting a chord-structure for “Never Let Me Down” to Carlos Alomar and Alomar politely modifying it from something Bowie good-naturedly jokes would otherwise have been “ponderous and funereal,” his natural reflex. I think of “Dancing Out in Space” as an example of the ponderous-and-funereal tendencies in a pop love song fully unfurled, and I find it both catchy *and* haunting. LK: When The Next Day came out remember feeling ambivalent about it— for me it felt like the album was trying too hard, perhaps overcompensating for something. But I wanted to love it, and of course the first half is super-strong. I think those appraisals were battered by information overload—that’s how I came into it, really loving the good bits on it and hating stuff I thought was badly executed.

Kardos elegantly sidesteps speculation about Bowie’s personal life in his final years, focusing instead on the work, taking in nods to Morrissey, Elvis Presley, Peaky Blinders and “the lust for life against the finality of everything”. Kardos, Leah(2014) Folio of compositions and critical commentary.(PhD thesis), The University of Queensland. Pierrot in Turquoise premiered on 28 December 1967 in Oxford, and a filmed version was broadcast on Scottish TV in 1970 (dir. Brian Mahoney). In it, violence takes place in a mirror world; Pierrot exacts murderous revenge after Columbine spurns his love in favour of Harlequin. Well, that was a lovely read, thank you Chris. I have the book on my kindle and am looking forward to reading it in spare moments while travelling around the country to catch up with family. I live in the Forest of Dean so have long known of Cold Lazarus by Dennis Potter. But I wonder whether Leah Kardos mentions Leonora Carrington at all? As a symbolist poet who lived between Mexico City and New York with her wonderful weird stories I cannot see Bowie would not have been aware of her. Her short story, White Rabbits, has already been referenced by Mary Anne Hobbs, as the husband is called Lazarus and has bandaged eyes. The story ends with the character’s fingers dropping down like ‘shooting stars’ over the bannister to the ground. Also I wonder if the Lazarus line – ‘dropped my cell phone down below’ (which always seemed a strange line to me) may not be referencing Carrington’s book about her experiences in a mental hospital, ‘Down Below’.

So when I pulled it all together, I thought I’d draw a line on it. Some people refer to this is his neoclassicist period, but I’d say it’s more accurately defined as his late period, due to him finding a more consistent approach to music making with Tony, free from label demands, and of course the conscious playing around with his own history. Bowie’s musical Lazarus (co-written with Irish playwright Enda Walsh) completes Thomas Jerome Newton’s story, and according to Walsh, is set inside a ‘morphine dream’. In interviews Walsh cited the work of British dramatist Dennis Potter, specifically The Singing Detective (BBC 1986), as an important reference. Potter’s own swan song, his final interconnected works, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus (BBC and Channel 4 1996), also seem to have been explicitly referenced here also. CO: You go a lot into Bowie’s “late voice” which you describe wonderfully as having the “wow and flutter of ancient tape.”Leah Kardos is a senior lecturer in music at Kingston University London, UK, where she co-founded the Visconti Studio with music producer Tony Visconti. She specializes in the areas of record production, pop aesthetics and criticism, and exploring interdisciplinary approaches to creative practice. CO: It’s still unclear to me, after all this time, whether Bowie, when he was putting out all of this stuff in his last years, had something like a complete design in mind. I guess I always saw him as someone who’d more draft extensive plans that would never come to fruition, as he’d abandon them to move onto something more interesting. But there’s a narrative logic to the 2013-2016 period, even if unintended. Do you think so, too? Do you see an overarching pattern? The chords of “Buddha of Suburbia” are amazing to look at. The way it’s pinned down on D with E minor and a G minor over the top, and then he flips it into B minor, then to B-flat—this isn’t a dude who just knows two chords on the guitar and can only play five notes. There’s immense sophistication going on. This kind of Eno ‘I’m not a musician, I’m just a dabbler’ thing allows him to engage in rule breaking, like he’s never claimed to be authentic about his music or belonging to any formal tradition with it. I will forever be an advocate for Bowie’s compositional prowess. It’s the reason why I love his music. Yes, it’s a name for a cancer lesion, although one usually associated with breast cancer, so its meaning in outer-space terminology is likely to have been far more significant for the Starman. As well as being the name of a “hidden planet” that the apocalyptically inclined think will crash into the Earth (“Guys! He knew it was coming!”) and another name for Saturn (“He won a Saturn acting award once!”), it’s also the term for the transitional state between a collapsed star and a singularity (a state of infinite value) in physics – which makes sense if Bowie is placing himself as the collapsed star, and the singularity the state he will enter after his death. Burroughs: Where did this Ziggy idea come from, and this five year idea? Of course, exhaustion of natural resources will not develop the end of the world. It will result in the collapse of civilization. And it will cut down the population by about three-quarters.