Off. The record was a production of I Heart Radio. David Bowie was in the middle of performing his song Reality when he first felt it, a sharp pain in his shoulder. He was June two four and he was playing a show at the Prague. The venue was sweltering, he was dripping with sweat. Besides that, he looked as good as ever, fit, stylish, and much sprightlier than his fifty seven years should have allowed. The thrashing rocker he sang was about staring down your own mortality, accepting it.
Now my sight is fading in this twilight, he sang. Then the pain hit. Suddenly. He couldn't catch his breath. He could barely manage the next line. Now my death is more than just a sad song. Then he stopped singing entirely. His bandmates glanced over, alarmed. They saw him hunched forward, clutching his chest and shoulder, looking pale, almost translucent. His eyes were wide. He seemed scared. Even the audience could tell something was badly wrong, and their expressions changed
from joy to concern. A bodyguard was summoned and let him off the stage. The band continued without him for a few numbers while David rallied in the wings. He hated to cancel shows. There were nights when he kept a bucket just out of the spotlight in case he needed to be sick. He went back out to continue. He struggled valiantly through China Girl and Modern Lover, but stumbled during the ten minute epic Station a Station excused
himself once more. After taking more time to recoup, he gave it one more shot, singing two more songs while seated on a stool, But then he finally gave in and took his premature bows. A doctor told him it was just a trapped nerve, nothing to worry about. He was given the go ahead to perform at a festival in Germany. Two days later. It was there on stage
before people that he'd suffer a heart attack. Hello and welcome to Off the Record, the show that goes beyond the songs and into the hearts and minds of rock's greatest legends. I'm your host, Jordan Runtug. This season explores the life, or rather lives of David Bowie. Today, we're looking at Bowie, the rock and roll elder statesman. Throughout the nineties, he continued to change and challenge inspiring new
generations with his work. Far be it from David to go gently into middle age, but more than ever, he enjoyed life off the stage. David had a second chance at marriage and fatherhood and was deliriously happy in both. He'd faced his demons and wonted. Now he faced his own mortality. That would be a much more difficult battle. It was a hot, hazy night in Nassau back in a bar band wrapped up their set in a tiny tourist watering hole. As they started to pack up, a
group of older guys sidled up. We want to play a few songs, mind if we borrow your gear? They asked for a bar band in the Bahamas. This was a fairly common request. It's always the same dudes on vacation, have a few beers and want to relive the glory days of their high school garage band. Here comes another tuneless version of Louis. Louis happens all the time. These guys looked like a yuppies, probably in town for a business conference, although one of them did look kind of familiar.
The stage crashers stepped up and grabbed their respective instruments. If they bothered to introduce themselves to the forty or so American travelers. It certainly didn't learn them any special attention. The name Tin Machine meant nothing to these sun burn and boozers bent over their umbrella drinks. But one by one I zeroed in on the lead singer. Is that David Bowie? No wait, I think it is no, that can't be him. He's got a beard. But it was David Bowie. And he loved every messy minute of this
five song guerrilla gig. The raw excitement gave him such a buzz for years. He meticulously stage managed each one of his performances, the lighting, props, and makeup, even the slightest gestures of his hands and face. Everything was engineered from maximum theatricality. Now devoid of drama and backed by his three friends, he could just rock. That is, after all, why he come to the Bahamas in the first place. He spent most days at a local studio working on
a new album. But it wasn't a David Bowie record, Make no mistake. This was a band like the Beatles of the Stones. He was his latest transformation, and in a way it was his most radical. He was no longer David Bowie superstar. He was David Bowie, lead singer of the band Tin Machine, just one of the guys. But of course he could never just be one of the guys. He was David Bowie backed by a bunch of guys who, regardless of their formidable musical talents, were
not David Bowie. At first, it all seemed rather dubious. He wasn't the first forty one year old man to start a band with a few friends. On the surface, it seemed like classic symptoms of a midlife crisis, up there with buying a sports car and getting a tattoo. It was indeed a strange move for such an unashamed individualist. Back in the sixties. His tenure and a string of
bands would always be comically short lived. He'd storm off for one reason or another with a gleefully selfish cry of numero uno mate, that's who he was looking out for number one these days, of course, he had nothing to prove. He was ready to have some fun. The endeavor was less a reaction to middle age and more of a reaction to his dismal last record, seven's Never Let Me Down. The title was amusing because the disc
succeeded in letting down pretty much everyone. Released just after his forty birthday, the glossy pop had been scrubbed of anything that bore even the slightest suggestion of grit or experimentation. Even the addition of his old Bromley school friend and fellow rock titan Peter Frampton failed to liven up the proceedings.
Even David was horrified by the songs. It wasn't played with any conviction, He'd say, it was studiofied to such an extent that halfway through the sessions I was going out to lunch and just leaving everyone else to it. Perhaps to distract from the subpar material, David promoted never
let Me Down. This most ambitious tour ever. It recalled the epic stage production of Diamond Dogs in four, but being the eighties, it was much bigger than Diamond Dogs in every sense, more of everything, more dates, more seats, more money. The set for what would become known as the Glass Spider Tour was touted as the biggest ever,
costing an outrageous ten million dollars. Named for the album track about a mythological rachnid, The centerpiece of the production was a massive glass spider that loomed sixty feet over the stage. Weighing three hundred and sixty tons, It required a jaw dropping forty three trucks just to transport it. Three hundred people worked in ships for poor straight days to assemble the set for its American debut in Philadelphia
that July. In a twist worthy of spinal tap, David discovered that the gargantuan spider was too big to fit into many indoor arenas. He hastily had a smaller junior spider build at no small cost. For David's entrance, he was lowered inside a translucent spider's belly while a fleet of dancers repelled down from the scaffolding above the stage. In a bid to make this a multi media event, the elaborately choreographed songs were broken up by short films.
The overamped guitar duels between Frampton and Carlos Alamar often descended into a sort of headbanging parody. Songs were chosen less for their audience appeal and more to serve the plots for a series of vignettes. For the big finale, David appeared on top of a radio tower wearing a gold lamat leather suit decked out with a pair of wings. Then he slid down to the stage to perform his encore.
It was, in a word, ridiculous. On paper, it was a success, press reports declared at the most lucrative tour of David's career, selling three million tickets. In retrospect, some would cite the show as a watershed for arena rock, paving the way for acts like You Two and Madonna to mount their own theatrical productions. But the Glass Spider Tour is seldom remembered as a triumph too many It's
smacked of an aging man trying too hard. Despite all of the props and flamboyance, it read as plotless and pointless, an overblown, self indulgent spectacle. David's productions had always been characterized by taste and style, even back in the low resource, ziggy Stardust days when he had to make do with homemade costumes and doing his own makeup. Yet now that money was no object, the Glass Spider set looked cheap, pathetic, observed one critic, Like an amateur theater production, said another.
Though Bowie initially enjoyed the Vegas style, absurdity of it all. He quickly grew tired of the hassle and tired in general. In advance of the tour, he'd submitted himse off the twelve hour rehearsals six days a week. He also insisted on overseeing all technical aspects of the production himself. By the time the tour kicked off in March, he was already exhausted. The rigorous choreography didn't exactly help. This is the most physical tour that I've ever done, he said.
It's relentless, it never stops. I'm bruised as hell. I feel like a worn out rag doll. He struggled to cope with the punishing number of dates. Some nights his voice gave out, forcing Carlos Alamar to step in and cover for him. David grew cranky, and he began to lash out at the band and crew, blaming them for the lukewarm reviews. When the show's wrapped in New Zealand that November, he ceremoniously burnt the spiders, said in a field. Back home in Switzerland, he found himself at loose ends.
He obviously wasn't gonna tour like that in anytime soon. Nothing he did seemed to be working, and his record label, E M I was always there to let him know. The conglomerate had shelled out some seventeen million dollars for a five record deal in two but since then his sales figures had taken a downward turn, marked the first time in seventeen years that Bowie's name didn't appear in the charts at all. In corporate speak, there was concern
about the declining prospects of a viable product. In other words, they theority was washed up past it. I spent force. David was starting to get flak about his age from all sides. During press conferences for the Glass Spider Tour, he fended off questions about arthritis and lame jokes about renaming it the Antique road Show. He managed the grin
and bear it without throttling any journalists. But when Kim Gordon of the ultra hip a rock band Sonic Youth described Bowie in an interview as quote old fart, it hurt. He seriously considered retiring all together and focusing on painting. I thought I should make as much money as I could and then quit. He later admit, I didn't think
there was any alternative. I thought I was obviously just an empty vessel and would end up like everyone else, doing these stupid shows and singing Rebel Rebel until I fall over and bleed. David's path forward revealed itself from the form of a cassette he'd received during the Glass Spider tour. His public relations officer had slipped him a tape of her husband's music. His name was Reeves Gribrels.
When David got around to playing reeves tape months after the tour wrapped, he was thoroughly impressed by his unique bluesy guitar. David called him up almost immediately, inviting him to his Swiss home. The collaborate. Reeves have been an avowed Bowie fan since his teenage years, but he found his hero surprisingly insecure and deeply unhappy. David can fighted that the multimillion dollar E m I deal made him feel duty bound to deliver hits, but the pressure to
be commercial left him creatively stifled. The success he'd had earlier in the decade, but the global smash Let's Dance left him confused about who he was singing to. In his own words, he'd lost his vision Instead, with reeves encouragement, he put the audience aside and revisited the music that made him excited. They poured over David's favorites Hendricks, Cream, John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy, and Junior Wells. These formative influences would be the basis for the sound of David's
new project, Tin Machine. A decade earlier, David had escaped the crushing tyranny of the top forty life by fleeing to Berlin and his aggressively uncommercial ambient explorations with Brian Eno. Now he took a similar approach, this time fleeing into a garage band. It allowed him to deconstruct the carefully assembled musical persona that had taken over his life. Like his Glass Spider tour, it had grown bloated and overblown. Now he could get back to the basics, and the
results were liberating. Rather than continue to court the mass appeal heater and but Let's Dance, he'd simply stop trying and just do what he wanted. Tin Machine was David's abrupt left turn to take him away from the middle of the road. It led to a creative dead end according to most critics, but at least he enjoyed the ride. For a rhythm section, he tapped brothers Tony and Hunt Sales,
sons of TV comedian Soupy Sales. They were twin dynamos who'd earned their stripes backing Iggy Pop and his lust for Life period before Iggy rudely dismissed them with the scathing line you're like heroin, I don't need you. Tales
of the sales excesses and bad behavior. Legendary drummer Hunt was described by one band as the kind of guy who quote consumes his own body weight and dangerous substances every day bassis Tony had been involved in a nasty car crash that sent a stick shift through his chest and left him legally dead for several minutes. His memory was still a little shaky from the multi month coma, and his bandmates often had to shout the chord changes
at him midsong. The brothers joined Reeves and Bowie in Switzerland, adding a dose of chaos to the sessions. It was volatile but productive. The first day yielded a new song, an unadorned retro blues called Heavens in Here. It was a sign of the fruitful partnership that would continue when recording formerly began at Compass Points Studios in the Bahamas. Some thirty five tracks coalesced in just six weeks, including one rockabilly two and that would give the band its name.
Most were recorded live, often in a single take. In between songs, the Sales brothers would call up their comedian father blasted the his dirty jokes through the studio p a. This set the tone for the productive, yet rowdy sessions. The Sales brothers were not the least big cowed by Bowie's reputation, and hectored him into leaving the rough edges
and raw improvised words. The resulting lyrics or uncharacteristically obscenity laden and some might say unsophisticated, but they give the tracks a punkish edge in many ways, predicting the grunge explosions still a few years off to hear David tell it, the decision to make the project a true four way partnership was obvious. I think this has got to be a band, David said at the end of an early session.
You guys don't listen to me anyway. It was the first time he'd embraced a group banner since his days with the Spiders from Mars, and even then it was his name out front. This time it was a gang of equals, equal pay and equal attention, though in practice it was less like a democracy and more like a shouting match, with a mild mannered Reeves on one side as David deputy and the facto musical director and the
rambunctious sales brothers on the other. David adored all of it, the teasing, the rough housing, the fighting, the whole sweaty four guys in a basement vibe. It was everything that had been missing from his musical life since his days in the King Bees. As a teen, a new, neatly trimmed beard signaled this new image, and so did another classic rock star accessory, a much younger girlfriend, Melissa Hurley, was a twenty year old soloist with the Los Angeles
Chamber Ballet. Talented, intelligent, and beautiful, she was hired as a dancer for the Glass Spider tour. Each night, she'd pose in the audience as a screaming fan, only to be dragged up on stage to dance seductively with David. Her effortless splits always managed to impress from this silly bit of stage business, their relationship blossomed. They made a cute cup bowl almost twenty years David's jr. She playfully tried to update his style with hats and scarves with
brightly colored eighties patterns. He'd play along for a few days before quietly losing them. She even got him to wear a thong at the beach, which led to merciless teasing from his bandmates. David loved to bring Melissa to art museums and elegant restaurants, the older man showing his love the world. David was enjoying his time as the frontman for a rock group, but the all for one,
one for all charade was becoming hard to maintain. When Tim Machine released their self titled debut in May of nine, many reviewers simply ignored the whole band thing and just described it as a new David Bowie record. David tried to combat this by insisting that all interviews be conducted with the whole band. Usually their quotes were telling as hunt sales. Joked to one journalist, the thing that makes us differ from other bands is that the lead singers
a millionaire, and of course he was right. Their low key club tour that summer may have looked like an old school rock and roll road show as they traveled by bus and played cards and ate it greasy spoon diners, But it was David who handed them each a thousand dollars in cash to buy product suits for their first gig. Sure they were equal, but David's wealth made him a little more equal to everyone who didn't happen to be in Tim Machine. It all seemed disingenuous, just another pretentious
character from David Bowie. This time he's posing as the frontman for some obscure rock band. The records sold decently, moving some two million copies, but the critical reactions mixed. Some found the raw, stripped down music exhilarating, citing it as his most exciting work in years. Others were turned off by their frattiness and phon nous. How can you build yourselves as a piste off, punky olt rock band when you have a superstar frontman and three virtuoso level musicians.
David himself started to moan about the bad press. The same people who had mocked the Glass Spider tours overblown pomposity now rejected his straight ahead rock approach. I can't get anything right, David complained, I can't go big, I can't go small. Whichever way I go is wrong. At a time when he seemed more than happy to put his past behind him, David was presented with a business opportunity that was too good to pass up. At the dawn of the nineties, the transition from vinyl to c
D was in full swing. Legacy artists like David, we're making a killing by reissuing their classic albums on this new digital format. Most acts did so with minimal attention to detail. Even the Beatles CD rollout was a notorious calamity with poorly remixed songs and cheap looking packaging. David was determined to avoid the same trap. He only agreed to the reissue if each CD contained something of value, unreleased bonus tracks or other outtakes the common practice. Now
he was one of the first to do it. David took it a step further by haralding his arrival on CD with a new rarities filled box set called Sound and Vision. To promote the remarketing of his life's work. He agreed to temporarily leave the dingy tim Machine clubs behind and revert back into his stadium god incarnation. He agreed to a tour, one that was unlike any he'd
ever undertaken. For the first time, he didn't have an album of new material, no new guys, persona or concept to get behind the sound and vision tour was purely a celebration of past glories. For a man who hated looking backwards, the idea of the Greatest Hits tour made him uncomfortable To cope, he boldly announced that this would be the last time he'd ever performed beloved titles from
his back catalog. This was to be a fond farewell before consigning title was like Ziggy Stardust, Heroes and Space Oddity to history. To make it more interactive, he introduced a phone poll and asked fans to vote on what songs to include in his set. One prankish music outlets started a campaign to gather votes for the Laughing Gnome David's cringeworthy sixties Novelty Number. David was amused, but ultimately declined to include the song. The trek would consist of
a d eight shows in twenty seven different countries. Slightly traumatized by the negative response to the elaborate Glass Spider tour, he took a minimalist approach this time around. The stage set was dominated by a massive, state of the art digital screen. It displayed various videos of David through the years, with which the slightly older flesh and blood David would interact. Though he'd cite the tourists as most enjoyable since the early Ziggy start US dates, it felt at times forced.
The experience seemed to underscore is increased LEAs schitzoid career motivation. David never truly squared his desire for both cult credibility and blockbuster mainstream income. This dichotomy was illustrated perfectly on the Sound and Vision tour when several dates included a lengthy mid show pause for a message from the sponsor a beer brand, killing the musical momentum in the process. God only knows what his Tin Machine bandmates would have
said to that. So which was it? Was David a rough and ready rock or rebel, or was he an arena idol with mass appeal? For David, those two identities existed in conflict with one another. It was a problem common for his peers. The first generation of rock stars were now reaching their forties, and there was no precedent for making the transition into middle age. Like many David
found themselves at a crossroads. Would he continuous attempts to break new ground, or, except that his best days were behind, find him to move forward? He risked ridicule. To look backwards, he risked becoming a parody. He pondered all this as he absolutely thumbed through a magazine on a flight between concerts. Then his eyes landed on a stunning woman who graced his page. He elbowed his seat mate to point her out. This girl's interesting, David said. Her name was a mon.
David Bowie met the love of his life on October. It was just days after he'd wrapped his Sound and Vision tour. One date Farewell That was musical past. That wasn't the only goodbye on the tour. His relationship with Melissa Hurley had come to an end. Despite reports of their engagement. It was an undramatic parting of the ways. David in years her senior would say that it had become quote one of those older men younger girls situations.
It became obvious to me that it just wasn't going to work out as a relationship, and for that she thanked me one of these days. He arrived in Los Angeles that fall, perfectly content in his bachelor of them, I felt that was it for me, he'd recall. I didn't want, need, or desire any more permanent relationships. Then he received an invite to a birthday party for a hairdresser friend named Teddy Anteline. David would say it was love at first sight when he first saw Hman Muhammad
Abdulma that night. Technically they had met a handful of times before, backstage at one of his gigs, and at various other celebrity functions, but the point remains clear. His attraction was intense and instant. I was naming the children the night we met, he would say, I just fell under her spell. For David, Imman was the perfect mix of sparkling intelligence, unshakable confidence, and other worldly beauty. Underline that last part, David was unequivocable about his first impressions.
I found her intolerably sexy, he'd later say. She was born in nineteen fifty five and Somalia to a family who prided themselves on intellectual excellence. Her father was a diplomat and her mother a position. Their vaulted social status couldn't protect them from a military coup, and they fled on foot to neighboring Kenya when she was a teenager.
It was there that she studied political science at the University of Nairobi, working her way through school with a waitressing gig and a job as a local translator, putting her five language fluency to good use. One day between classes in she was spotted on the street by famed American photographer Peter Beard. Beard was impressed with her obvious beauty and asked if she'd ever been photographed. Moms offended. Oh God, she thought, here goes another white man who
thinks we've never seen a camera before. She agreed to sit for a shoot provided Beard pay the eight thousand dollars for her college tuition. Beard, who knew a good investment when he saw it, agreed. He used his formidable contacts, the Getty Mans, signed to one of Manhattan's top modeling agencies, Wilhelmina, who had represented the likes of Lauren Hutton and Angelica Houston.
Like David Iman, was preda naturally wise in the ways of medium manipulation, she played along with the bizarre and sort of racist Cinderella backstory the agency concocted for They cast their latest discovery as a nomadic Somali cattle girl who spoke no English. It was all fabrication, Eman admitted, But I was definitely not the victim of it. I was an accomplice. I knew exactly what was going on.
She was less wise about the fashion industry. When photographed for Vogue, she apparently never heard of the fashion Bible. It was also her first time wearing makeup and high heels. I was like a dear cought in the headlights of a car, she would remember. She proved to be a natural, able to convey complex emotion through minute manipulations of her hands and face, just like David and his talents. For mine, even the m O was similar. You have to give
people fantasies, She'd say. You have to create illusions all the time. Iman would come to dominate the fashion landscape, and much the same way David did music. The world's biggest designers saying her praises. Eve St Laurent would refer to her as flawless. Karl Logerfeld would call her one of the greatest models in the world. I used her from the start. Bill Blast would say, the truth is
she's a great actress. Future supermodels like Naomi Campbell and Tyra Banks would cite her as both a trailblazer and a mother figure. By the time she met David, she'd retired from the runway and embarked on her second successful career as a businesswoman with her own cosmetics line, recently divorced from NBA star Spencer Haywood. She was, like David,
wary of getting into another long term relationship. I had no intention of getting married again ever, she'd say, and somebody in music never like a hole in the head. I definitely didn't want to get into a relationship with somebody like David. Yet he won her over with charm and a little persistence. Two weeks after they started casually dating, she flew to Paris for business. When she returned to l A, David was on the tarmac to meet her,
flowers in hand. Photographers had a field day. David didn't care when it came to courtship. He was old fashioned, a classic English gentleman. It was the little things that melted her heart. The way he held the door for her, the way he got down in the middle of a street to tie her shoes when her laces came undone. On the fourteenth of every month, he'd send her flowers for their mini anniversary. He loved to read to her, just like her father had done. I fell in love
with David Jones, she'd say, not David Bowie. Both were mature masters of their respective fields. Both were secure, both financially and personally. As Iman would note, we've both lived a bit on the wild side, and we're both deep down home bodies. For all their similarities, their differences complimented one another well. Iman was grounded with a strong singular identity. That's what I needed my life, David would say, someone who doesn't have a fractured personality, very down to earth.
Iman's parents liked David, but they would have preferred if he was Somali or Muslim, or at very least black. Still, that didn't stop David from proposing in October, a year after they'd met. He had arranged the moment with the same care he lavished on his stage shows. They were in Paris, and he rented a boat to take them up and down the scene as the pianist he hired played April in Paris, David got down on one knee. The ring dated from the eighteenth century. They'd spotted it
together while shopping in Florence. When David returned to get it, he discovered that someone else had already bought it, so David used his special bowie privileges to track down the new owner and buy it off him. The couple also marked their union in a more modern way and a more permanent one tattoos. David opted for a figure riding a dolphin on his left calf, all overlaid with the
Japanese translation of the Serenity Prayer. The unusual illustration was inspired by a book he'd recently read, called A Grave for a Dolphin, in which a European protagonist finds a sense of peace during his wanderings in Somalia. The character reminded David of himself. Emma On shows a more literal symbol for her tattoo, a bowie knife above her ankle, with the word David written on the handle. She also got his name in Arabic lettering tattooed on her stomach.
David proposed again a few days later on stage at the Paris Olympia Theater, where he was playing a gig with Tin Machine. He'd reunited with his merry band of rockers not long after wrapping his sound and vision commitments. Aman joined him for some of the dates, giving her an early taste of having a road warrior as a husband, but she ultimately went home early, correctly observing how many times can you hear the same songs? She wasn't the
only one that grow tired of David's band executed. David's label, E M I were also less than thrilled by David's latest musical Foray. After all, they'd shelled out millions for David Bowie, not Tin Machine, whoever they were. They balked at the prospect of releasing a second Tin Machine record, forcing David to find another label. The public seemed equally bored by their sophomore offering, called apropriately enough Tim Machine Too.
The aggressive mash of feedback and distortion held some catchy melodies and strong songs, notably Goodbye Mr Ed, Shopping for Girls, and the thundering lead single You Belong in Rock and Roll. Bowie himself would rate the album among his all time favorites. But it didn't connect with audiences, failing to break the top twenty in the UK. It did even worse in the US, where it failed to break a hundred and twenty on billboard. After that, David's enthusiasm for the band
began to cool. Nothing against the guys, but his priorities were changing professionally and personally. I no longer need attention, he said, somewhat dubiously. At the time, I wondered the adoration of the masses, the audience, because I was incapable of one, the one communication. I used to feel nothing without my work. Now I no longer feel guilty if I'm not working. Now he had him on and she
had him. They were legally married on April. It was a quiet service at the city hall in Lausanne, Switzerland, but the public ceremony for family and friends a few weeks later, on June six, was significantly less quiet. It took place at the St. James Church in Florence, with the hovering news helicopters and cheering crowds. David and Aman retreated like foreign dignitaries. They received a police escort to the church, blowing red lights and causing traffic jams. All
throughout the ancient city. Friends like Yoko Ono and Brian Eno were on hand for the fifty minutes service, which featured music David had written especially for the day. Stylist Teddy Anteline, who first introduced the couple, did their hair. The groom wore a white tie suit, the better to show off as glowing tan, topped off with a silver stud in his ear. The bride wore an oyster colored dress with a train. She walked down the aisle to
the sound of a Bulgarian folk song. David's twenty one old son, Zoe now going by Joey, stood by his father as best man. Afterwards, guests were invited to party at a former Medicia State where they danced to David's own mixtape. The night ended with riverside fireworks before the new husband and wife turned in just after midnight. The next day, they set out for a month long honeymoon to Bali in Japan, a trip that a mom would
call divinely sexy. To describe the moment as a turning point in David's life would be both cliche and an understatement. When Presston interviews to name his greatest achievement, he'd unflinchingly answer, marrying my wife, nothing else counts. David would mark the occasion with a new record, a new David Bowie record. The Tin Machine were no more. There was no big bust up and not even a formal split. Some would say the end came the moment he shaved his beard.
It was highly symbolic. After a few years of pretending to be an outsider, he wanted his old life back. His memories of the band mirrored their mixed reviews. When it worked, it was unbeatable, He'd say, some of the most explosive music that I've ever been involved in or even witnessed. But when it was bad, it was so unbelievably awful you just wanted the earth to open up
and take you under. The band was an absolutely necessary step and his artistic path, helping him break out of the boring MTV cycle he found himselves in with Let's Dance. It got him back to his roots and recalibrated his creative compass, and it all led him straight back to the guy who helped him make Let's Dance. For his new record, he teamed up with Nile Rodgers, co producer
and sonic architect of David three global blockbuster. It was a move that would strike something close to David is confusing. He just spent years trying to put that part of his career behind him. Now it seemed like he was going backwards. Perhaps he was caaving the pressure from his label who wanted him to get serious and deliver hits, or perhaps it was just too personal to be a
band project. From the start, he intended the record, Black Tie, White Noise, to be, in his own words, his wedding album. It opens with a euphoric instrumental piece called the Wedding, which he composed for the nuptials in Florence, complete with ringing church bells. The tune is a marriage of Western and Eastern modes, signifying their own cultural union. He reprises the theme for the closing track, the Wedding Song, on
which he sings of his angel for Life. The album also contains the song Jump They Say, inspired by suicide of his elder half brother Terry. Never before David publicly voiced his feelings on this devastating loss. The lyrics are oblique, but Terry's ghostly presence as felt through references to madness and death, The specter of David's late brother can also be felt in another song, the techno funk cover of I Feel Free, originally by Cream. Decades earlier, David had
taken Terry to see the band perform. Terry had set young David's imagination a light by showing him around the jazz haunts of Soho as a schoolboy. Now, David was thrilled to reciprocate by taking his elder brother to his very first psychedelic rock show. But the irre splitting music triggered a psychotic episode in Terry and early manifestation of the schizophrenia that would derail his life. Midway through the show, Terry fled the theater and collapsed on the sidewalk outside,
tormented by visions of hell fire. It was a pivotal moment in David's life, one that marked a permanent split with the man who had been his dear friend, protector and mentor. David would remember Cream playing I Feel Free in the Distance, the soundtrack to his own law Denocence. His choice to cover the song on Black Tie White Noise was made all the more poignant by the addition
of guitarist Mick Ronson. Mick had been David's main collaborator and on stage foil during his formative Ziggy years, delivering bone crunching guitar solos in addition to the lush orchestral arrangements for David's early gems. Their relationship had been strained since David famously jettison the Spiders from Mars during his Ziggy Stardust retirement show. When Ronson made his own bid for the Spotlight with a solo record, David felt betrayed and the two stopped speaking. It would take almost a
decade for them to perform together again. Relations finally began to fall in three when David brought Ronson out as a special guest on one of his serious Moonlight Tour dates. They stayed in touch after that, but mostly kept their distance. The next time they share the stage was in April at a tribute concert for Freddie Mercury, who had recently died of an age related illness. Ronson's own health crisis
brought a somber edge to the already melancholic event. He'd been diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer and knew his time could be measured in months. The news triggered a flood of emotions in David, who invited Mick into the studio to record one more time together for old Time's sake. It would be his first appearance on a Bowie record in twenty years, and it was also his last. Mick Ronson died weeks after the release of Black Tie, White Noise in the spring. He was forty seven years old.
David was in the midst of his press tour and honored his following bandmate frequently during interviews. Of all the early seventies guitar players, Mick was probably one of the most influential and profound. David told TV host ar Senio Hall days after his death, I miss him a lot. Curiously, David failed to attend Ronson's tribute concert, a decision that puzzled fans and rankled ron and his loved ones. He'd
done it for Freddie Mercury, why not Mick. The truth was complicated, as is often the case when David grappled with sentimentality. Friends recalled David listening to Old Spider's era recordings and the weeks after Ronson's death and being moved to tears by the guitarist virtuosity. Many who interacted with David over the years, but declare him an ice man, incapable of foraging an authentic emotional connection. In reality, the feelings were likely too much to bear. It was just
easier to move forward. David was in the midst of a creative renaissance. He followed Black Tie, White Noise a few months later with one of his greatest and most overlooked albums. It was the soundtrack to a four part television film based on the novel The Buddha of Suburbia, about a young Indian man caught between the old world and new values as he comes of age in South London. David loves the book. He'd to himself The Boddho of
Suburbia during his arts lab years and Beckingham. He was such a fan that a magazine sent him to interview the books author, Hanive Kureshi, a fellow Bromley boy who had even attended the same school as Bowie. At the end of the interview, the author mentioned that the BBC was adapting the book for a movie. Mostly as a joke. He suggested Bowie do the music. Within days, they were
both in a recording studio. Bowie worked on the BBC's Tight Time schedule writing and recording the music, and just six days he also worked on the BBC's tight budget, a pittance that left him thoroughly amused. Though only the title track was actually featured in the film, it was
categorized as a soundtrack album and marketed accordingly. That is to say, it was barely marketed at all when it was released in November of the Buddha of Suburbia became David's first album in twenty two years not to make the UK charts. It wasn't even released in the States until Despite its obscurity, or perhaps because of it, David would cite the record as a favorite. On some level, he was probably relieved to avoid the hoopla that accompanied
chartbusting sales. When a reporter asked if he planned on launching a tour to promote Black Tie, White Noise, he only laughed, heavens no, I'd like to, but it takes up so much time. I think I lost a lot of my life doing that iman and completely redefined David's existence. She's changed my life, David said, I give far more over to her than before, so it takes a wedge out of what I would be throwing into my work.
The idea of getting married and then immediately running away for ten months on tour seemed like, in his words, a disaster. Instead, they traveled the world together, from Bali to southern England, the grounds of King Arthur's mythical Camelot. My idea of an experience is a yacht cruise with them on, He'd say, I want to be with her, She's my soul mate. Their devote into each other was total, as far from a show biz marriage as one could get.
One Christmas Human made David slippers, waking up an hour before his six am alarmed to Hambroiderer's initials. David made strenuous efforts to get healthy for his new bride. He gave up drinking and took up jogging. He even tried to quit smoking, but that habit proved harder to kick. He's still inhaled upwards of sixty Marlboro lights a day, burning them down to his knuckle before lighting the next
with the ashes of the first. He tried books, tapes, even a hypnotist, but the couch, he said, only gave him a sore bum. The time he'd previously spent on music instead went to the visual Arts. He began developing his art collection, purchasing works by Damien Hurst, David Bamberg, and Jean Michelle Baskiot. David appeared in the Late Street Artists biopic Playing of All People Andy Warhol. Much as he done for The Elephant Man, David did his research.
He visited the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and handled some of his personal effects, even borrowing the pop Art Titan's wig for the film. He read extensively on art history and attended lectures. David even joined the editorial board for Modern Painters magazine. He continued to paint himself, pursuing a passion that dated back to his days at Bromley Tech as a student in the art class taught by Peter
Frampton's father Owen. In his own mind, he had always seen himself as less of a musician and more of a painter, had gone astray. In April, David held his first solo exhibition at a London gallery, displaying portraits, sculptures and images generated through computers, his new favorite tool. Art critics were suspicious of paintings by those of David, Silk rock music, being traditionally viewed as a lesser art form, and the reviews were predictably savage. The word embarrassing cropped
up at least once. And then there was another of David's visual projects, wallpaper That's right. David Bowie created a line of wallpaper produced in tandem with Laura Ashley. To be fair, this wasn't your grandma's wallpaper. One design included a charcoal drawing of a mythological half man half bull creature known as a minotaur. The critics, not to mention,
David's fans, were baffled. One reviewer was bold enough to ask if the wallpaper was David's artistic suicide note, but David seemed to take it a lot less seriously than everyone else. I chose wallpaper because of its status as something completely incongruous, He'd explained. I haven't completely lost my sense of irony. I'm midway between high art and low art. I'm a mid art populist and a postmodernist Buddhist who's casually surfing his way through the chaos of the late
twentieth century. When David and Human wished to further escape the chaos of the late twentieth century, they flew to the island of Mystique, an outpost for wealthy British expats and the Grenadines, just off the coast of South America. David had first visited the island in six when Mick Jagger and his girlfriend Jerry Hall invited him down to their estate for Christmas. David immediately fell in love with the remote, tropical paradise. In His ongoing competition with Mick
made it all the more appealing. Bowie, after all, was always anxious to keep up with the Jaggers. Soon David at his own plot of land and a team of workmen constructing a compound. It was exact specifications. It was a fantasia of Asian influences. There were Japanese gardens with ornamental koi ponds and a Balinese dining pavilion that overlooked the mountains of Britannia Bay. The main house was stocked with fourteen cargo containers of antiques from all around the world.
Mostique became David's sanctuary, where he could read, paint and work on the screenplay he'd been tinkering with for years. When even that became too taxing, he could take a dip in the sea or eat some lobster or just watch the sunset with him on. He would later describe the home of somewhere where he had absolutely no motivation to do a thing. Inevitably, David would be drawn back into his music. He'd rekindled his connection with Brian Eno,
his co conspirator on the boldly experimental Berlin Trilogy. The pair hadn't worked together since nineteen seventy nine's Lodger. In the intervening years, you Know would become one of the most in demand producers in music, overseeing groundbreaking releases for Talking Heads, You Two, and Divo, all of whom were deeply influenced by the work he'd done with Bowie. Reunited at David's wedding, they each played pieces of their own music at the reception, and we're thrilled by the response
on the dance floor. This spark talks for a new album, which they hoped would be the most uncompromising of their careers. For a fresh approach, they visited the Googing Psychiatric Hospital near Vienna, where a group of patients were housed in a combination clinic and artist commune. There they could give free reign to their creative impulses. And express themselves outside
of the usual parameters placed on artists. David Andino brought some of their outsider artwork back with them to their studio Touchstones for their New Outlook sessions in Montrose, Switzerland took on the atmosphere of an avant garde art happening when they began in March, and all star lineup of Bowie collaborators have been assembled, including Berlin Trilogy veteran Carlos Alamar, ex Spider from Mars, Mike Garson, Tim Machine bandmate, Reeves
Gabrel's drummer Sterling Campbell, and Basis Erdal Kazilka. Paints, charcoal, canvas and paper were left around the studio just in case anyone wanted to express themselves visually when they were playing. As much as he did on Heroes and Lodger, Eno employed his trust the Oblique Strategies cards to prime the creative pump with unorthodox suggestions, but this time he took it a step further, devising a complex role playing game to break the players out of their usual habits and
self limiting mindsets. At the start of the sessions, he passed a card to each musician that contained information about their character. You're on the third moon of Jupiter and you're the house band, read one. You're the morale booster of a small, ragtag terrorist operation. You must keep spirits up at all costs, said another. Bowie's card informed him that he was a town crier in a society where all media networks have tumbled down. The experiments continued as
they play it as well. Sometimes, you know, would have the musicians listen to motown oldies through their headphones as they recorded a totally unrelated song, just to see how the music in their ears has impacted the vibe of the new track out of context. These approaches seem like the comical whims of an eccentric producer, but there was a method to the madness. It was intended to keep the music from jelling too much and becoming too homogenized
too In ENO's words, coherent. The interesting place is not chaos, and it's not total coherence, he would explain, it's somewhere on the cusp of those two. Bowie took a similar approach with his lyrics. He updated the William Burrows style cut and paste technique that he used on Diamond Dogs. This time he fed bits of poems and magazine articles into a computer program that randomly reconfigured sentences and phrases,
much as he had while making Low. David started getting concerned notes from his label, wondering what the hell he was doing. That's when David knew they were onto something good. The experimentation paid off. They completed some thirty five hours of backing tracks in just ten days. Is then it took David a year and a half to whittle it down and craft the songs, and there was a single narrative, or, as he put it, a nonlinear gothic drama hyper cycle. It was a return to the sci fi concept albums
that he'd largely avoided since Diamond Dogs. This time he'd craft a fictional dystopian realm that was more ambitious than any he'd ever attempted. Over the early months, he added a series of spoken words sigus or monologues to flesh out the surreal murder plot. It was somewhat dense and convoluted, more akin to a graphic novel than an album, featuring
not one but seven protagonists. Based on a short story he'd written called The Diary of Nathan Adler, the tale follows the dismemberment of a fourteen year old runaway whose body parts are intended for use in an art piece. Detective Nathan Adler, who works in the government's newly formed Art Crime Bureau, is tasked with determining what is legally acceptable as art and what's trash. It's a biting comment on both the turn of the millennium anxiety and also
the art scene of the era. Perhaps the poor reviews David received at a solo exhibition provided some inspiration. David called the album One Outside. Despite the numeral and its title and the to be continued teas at the end, the four sequels he supposedly had planned never materialized, even with the unresolved cliffhanger, It's his definitive work of the nineties. At seventy five minutes, it's David's longest record, a sprawling
epic that confounds and intrigues. As with the best of his work, it manages to meld a host of disparate contemporary musical influences in a way that's both fresh and original. One Outside was released in September at the height of the brit pop craze. It was a time when bands like Swede, Pulp, Supergrass and Blur ruled the air waves, reverently, following in the footsteps of the British rock forefathers, of
whom Bowie was an esteemed member. The hit parade was choked with the sound that David himself had helped engineer, and it would have been easy for him the court success by imitating his imitators. Instead, he challenged listeners with the trip hop techno of I'm Deranged and the electro free jazz of A Small Plot of Land. There were eno esque textured soundscapes like the motel and Wishful Beginnings and the hard edged industrial rock of The Heart's Filthy Lesson.
This latter song became the album's lead single, a suitably uncompromising choice. It's so packed with goth doom that director David Fincher selected the song to play over the closing titles of A serial killer drama seven. The deliberately controversial music video was directed by Sam Beer, who done the same for Nirvana Smells Like Teen Spirit. It was a nightmarishly gory horror movie montage of skulls, candles, and troubling
items and jars. The grim griminess expressed Bowie's growing fascination with blood rights and neopaganism, but most missed these references and found themselves simply terrified by the visuals. The video was banned by MTV, which surely must have pleased a renegade like Bowie. After more than twenty years as a public figure, he still had the power to shock and
outrage with his new bloody, rusted razor blade aesthetic. David aligned himself with artie shock rockers like Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails, the ladder of which was a growing influence on him. While recording one Outside, he often listened to The Downward Spiral, which was released just weeks before sessions began in March. As fate would have it, Nine Inch Nails as Trent Resner, listened to Bowie's album Low
on a daily basis while recording The Downward Spiral. It seemed logical that their pass with Cross, but many were surprised when they announced the joint us tour, set to kick off in the summer of Nine Inch Nails opened the show, paying tribute to the headliner with versions of Scary Monsters and Subterranean, before bringing out the man himself. After duets on reptile and hurt. They seated the stage, The Bowie and the crowd generally couldn't have cared less
for David. The tour was an act of stubborn artistic bravery. Firstly, it opened themselves up to accusations that he was a rock and roll Peter Pan, trying to prove that he could still keep the pace with the young guys. Moreover, his fan base hardly overlapped with that of Nine Inch Nails. As soon as the band said they're on stage farewells, there was a mass exodus towards the arena doors. The audience were mostly teenagers. They didn't want to stay for
this old timer. David made no effort to be accommodating, stacking his set almost exclusively with tracks from one outside. As he'd mischievously explained, I slip on stage after a set by the most rest of band ever to conquer the top forty. I don't do hits. I performed lots of songs from an album that hasn't been released, and the older songs that perform are probably obscure even to my oldest fans. I use note theatrics, no videos, and often no costumes. It's a dirty job, but I think
I'm just the man for it. He liked the challenge of winning over and in different audience, like his excursions with Tin Machine. It made him feel exhilarated, inspired, and maybe a little youthful. But it made pretty much everyone else feel confused. Even Reisner was surprised by how the tour was shaking out. His gargantuan success hadn't changed the fundamentally shy Bowie super fan that he was at heart.
He was daunted by the prospect of touring with his hero, and found himself desperately hoping that he wouldn't bump into David backstage before a show. It was just too intimidating. Reisner was at a particularly unhappy point in his life, drowning and drugs and self loathe him. The adoration of the audience seemed like mockery in his depressed state. He was low, and David recognized it. He'd been there and
it was still familiar. He did what he could to offer some big brother style advice to his young friend, delivered with compassion and a warm arm around his shoulder. You know, he said, there's a better way here, and it doesn't have to end in despair or death. David himself was a living example, a happy person, insanely in love, still making art that was fearless. It could be done, and Resner would get there someday. David had gone through it,
and now he led by quiet example. His music had inspired many to get into the industry, now his aging inspired many to survive it. David Bowie turned fifty years old on January eight. His birthday was treated as a major historical milestone by the world press. There were retrospectives on the BBC and profiles and magazines and newspapers. Many of his rock star brethren had tried to downplay the fact that they were now half a century old, but not David. The following day, he threw himself a party.
Nothing crazy, just an intimate, low key gathering at Madison Square Garden with twenty thousand fans and hosts of artists on the cutting edge of the music scene. Clearly as dramatic flair hadn't paid at with age. He appeared on stage looking his most ziggy like in years, with a lacey frock coat topped off of the red dyed rooster
cut pale pancake makeup and thick lashings of mascara. At first, he stuck the selections from One Outside and his upcoming album Earthling before revisiting his golden oldies the help of his famous guests. Turns out he wasn't going to retire those songs after all. There were appearances by The Cures, Robert Smith, Foo Fighters, the Pixies, Frank Black and Sonic youth Billy Corgan appeared during the second encore to perform
All the Young Dudes and a raucous Geene Genie. Organizers for the paper Review Extravaganza tried to pressure David into inviting safe choices classic rock piers like Mick Jagger Tina Turner, but The Birthday Boy refused. In fact, his only contemporary was Lou Reed, warmly introduced as the King of New York. Towards the end of the show, the band launched into Happy Birthday as David, looking genuinely surprised, was presented with
the birthday cake with Trick Campbell's. He thanked fans who followed his career for decades and welcomed those who were new to his music. I don't know where I'm going from here, he said, but I promise I won't bore you. It was an event befitting ahead of state, which in many ways is what he'd become. For much of his career.
He'd been a political Now he was chummy with Tony Blair, the first baby boomer Prime Minister, presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Brits the English equivalent of the Grammys. He was offered a life peerage in the English House of Lords, but Bowie had no interest in being a baron. He would also turn down a knighthood from the Queen. I'm indifferent to royalty, he explained. Accepting one of those things would make me feel owned, and
I'm not owned by anybody. But he showed his British pride on his next album, Earthling, released in February. On the cover, he wears a long overcoat emblazoned with a distressed Union jack. Though he didn't embrace the jangly sound of the britpop explosion, he was caught up in the Cool Britannia movement that swept the globe like a second coming of Swinging London as it had in the sixties. This wave of British creativity touched on all areas of
the arts. There were films like Danny Boyle's Train Spotting, visual art from Damien Hurst and Tracy Emmon. Fashion was represented by Kate Moss and Alexander McQueen, who designed Bowie's coat for the Earthling cover. The war torn flag was Bowie's way of owning his status as the Old Guard.
He was one of the originals. Though he recorded Earthling in New York City, he pronounced his English accent in a way that he seldom had since his day's, imitating Anthony Newley on his debut record instead of the baroque poppy favored back in nine seven. David of the nineties dove deeper into the sound of electronic club music, known alternately as jungle or Drummond bass. Both names evoked the rapid fire rhythms, thundering beats and slashes of fuzzed out
guitar heard at raves and cross the UK. Five days after returning from his outside tour, David entered the Manhattan recording space owned by composer Philip Glass to begin work with producer Mark Platty, a man well versed in the comparatively new art of digital production. Guitar parts and drums were recorded live and then processed through a sampler, were
distorted through a synthesizer. Songs like Little Wonder, Telling Lies, I'm Afraid of Americans, and Dead Man Walking were custom made to be remixed by DJ's for the dance floor. It would be David's first album recorded entirely digitally. David was intrigued by the concept that music could be made on the small laptop that he carried with him everywhere. The ease with which one could make him manipulate sounds opened the door for whole new realms of experimentation and spontaneity.
David had been an early adopter of home computers, embracing them as a valuable tool for his work and life. Although for a while he needed help turning it on. It came in handy for setting lyrics or for graphic design. He coordinated elements of Seven's Glass Spider Tour via email, long before most people had even considered such a notion. Email would become a preferred method of communication for the
rest of his life. I'd be completely lost without it, he'd say in the early nineties, way before the rest of us would echo the sentiment. In later years, he was known to bombard friends with the YouTube videos that had caught us attention. It soon became apparent to David that the computer was more than a mere gadget, but a mechanism that was fundamentally alter culture and the very
way human beings processed the world around them. He sensed the change would be exponentially greater than the advent of television due to the interactive potential of the Internet. This wasn't just a communications system, it was, in his words, an alien life form. He predicted a nonlinear society capable of recombining and re contextualizing information. Happidly, it sounded like one of his mid seventies sci fi plots, on par with Ziggy or Hunger City, but it was all scarily prescient.
I think the potential for what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable, he told a skeptical BBC News reporter in It's gonna crush your ideas of what mediums are all about. Music, he felt an especially rock and roll, had lost its immediacy, its urgency, and its power as a change agent. Instead, he believed that spirit continued on with the Internet. I wanted to be a musician because it felt rebellious, he said.
It felt subversive, It felt like one could affect change. The Internet now carries the flag of being subversive and rebellious. The monoculture was crumbling. The singularity had disappeared. We'd entered an age of pluralism. The fragmentation that Bowie had felt within himself was now being illustrated on a grand global scale. There were no longer era defining cultural figures like Elvis, or the Beatles, or even himself. Now it's subgroups in genres.
He'd say, it's about the community. It's becoming more and more about the audience. He imagined the ways that the Internet would not only change the way that content is delivered, but how it would redefine the relationship between the user and the provider, and the long term effects that would have on intellectual property. Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity, he said. At the turn of the millennium, a decade before streaming services became prevalent.
You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring, he warned, as fellow musicians, because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left sensing the sea change. Bowie responded accordingly. In November, he released the song Telling Lies on his website, making it the first downloadable single by a major artist. To help launch Earthling, he held a cyber cat best of his concert from Boston, though few people had a strong enough Internet connection to view
it properly. The following year, he ventured to change that by launching bowie Net, his own high speed internet service that offered a host of exclusive Bowie centric content, ranging from video feeds, chat rooms, and q and a sessions with Bowie himself. This wasn'theard of for a musician of Bowie's caliber. If a performer had a website at all in the nineties, it was just a digital billboard to shill their latest album or tour. Bowie Nett was a
social network before the term existed. David greeted those who entered his cyber home with a message, I welcome all you web travelers to the first community driven Internet site that focuses on music, film, literature, painting, and more. The purposes interactivity and community. Everybody has a voice. David was a regular in his chat rooms, posting under the handle sailor at us. With most celebrities, his information on the world came through handlers and representatives, many of whom had
a vested interest in his reaction or response. With the Internet, David could get the info for himself unfiltered. I love the chat rooms because you get to hear what people genuinely think, he said. The communication between me and my web audience has become more intimate than it's ever been. It's a feeling I enjoyed because it's new to me. It's adventurous. It's a new position of what the artist is. It's a demystification. Bowie would lose ours hold up in
his home office, known as the Bunker. When he wasn't lurking in his own chat rooms, he indulged his curiosity on the web or purchased obscure collectibles on eBay. Sometimes his Internet excursions carried on late into the evening, which created a bit of tension in his marriage. Iman wasn't too happy because I just never came to bed, he admitted. Once you start surfing at night, you can really break up a relationship. You've got to be very careful about that,
he cautioned. Towards the end of the computer game company Edo's Interactive asked Bowie to provide music for an adventure video game they were developing called a Micron the Nomad Soul. The programmers sweetened the deal by offering to turn David Iman and even members of David's band and two characters in the game. How could a futurist techno nerd resist? Sessions for the game soundtrack evolved into a full fledged Bowie album called Ours, and its rollout was an appropriately
digital affair. The cover art was unvailed on Bowie's website or the album will be made available as a digital download prior to its release on CD, another first for a major artist. But the real master stroke was the cyber song contest, offering one lucky fan the chance to write four lines of lyrics the album track, What's Really Happening, a hummed melody, was shared to Bowie's website and budding writers were encouraged to give it their best shot. Bowie
was inundated with over eighty thousand submissions. The winner, an Ohio college student named Alex Grant, was given a fifteen thousand dollar publishing contract. And flown to New York to watch David record his words grown inside a plastic box. Micro thoughts and safety locks. Hearts become outdated clocks ticking in your mind. The entire event was webcast, allowing fans to watch as a new Bowie song was completed before their very eyes. After the daring and bombastic Earthling and
one outside hours found David at his most introspective. Themes of mortality crop up on tracks like Thursday's Child, The Dreamers and The Standout Survive. There was, after all, a lot to be reflective about. It was the fall in the end of the millennium encouraged many to take stock. The year marked an end, but it also signaled a new beginning. It certainly was for David and Iman. Just two months into the new year, they announced that they were going to be parents. They've been trying for a
baby for years, but several rounds of IVF proved fruitless. Ultimately, they conceived naturally. Iman credited the successful conception to a traditional African remedy holding a borrowed baby. In this case, the child was supplied by fellow supermodel Christie Brinkley during a Vogue photo shoot. Their little girl was born on August two thousand at Manhattan's Mount Sinai Hospital. David cut the umbilical cord himself, weighing in at seven pounds four ounces.
They called her Alexandria Zara Jones, her name inspired by the ancient Greco Egyptian seat of culture. She is wonderful, David gushed, and probably I believe the most intelligent child that's ever been born. A father again at fifty three, he was thrilled, except that is for one thing. I don't do nappies, he admitted, the dreaded diaper duty. Aside, he was a devoted father, He cleaned up his last remaining vice, finally kicking his multiple pack a day smoke
habit for good. Cognizant of his spotty paternal attendance record during his son's early years, David insisted he wouldn't tour as much. I don't want to make the same mistakes with Lexi, he said. As David was reappraising his approach to fatherhood, he became an orphan himself. His mother, Peggy, died at an English nursing home just a few months after Lexi's birth in April of two thousand one. She was eighty seven years old. Her death came out of
the blue and was a horrible shock to David. The chilliness that had characterized their relationship in his youth had thawed by the eighties, when they spent holidays and vacations together. He cared for her, even spoiled her. It's unclear whether he got the acceptance that he craved and returned. I'm sorry to hear about your mom, a friend told him after the funeral. You know, I don't think she ever took to me, David replied. Trouble was, I don't think
she ever took to me either. David's daughter became the center of his world. A year after her birth, he described his main job as daddyfying, and it brought him untold joy. To be honest, I really have to pull myself together to focus on music, he said. Sometimes it almost feels like a distraction. He began a period of nesting. After years of flitting between houses all over the world,
he set down roots in New York. The New Soho apartment he shared with Iman and Lexei became his primary residence. I can't imagine living anywhere else, he'd say. I am a New Yorker, he loved it for all the same reasons. John Lennon had love to mention other UK stars, all too familiar with the ferocity of British paparah see. In New York, they could be anonymous and move around without a photographer's lens shoved in their face. If David threw on a cap and some jeans, he could be almost anyone.
He didn't much go for disguises, but he found that pretending to read a Greek newspaper allowed him to ride public transport with minimal hassle. He was an early riser, waking up at six to venture out on dawn walks around the city. Sometimes he brought Lexie and her stroller, other times he just went solo. After getting his groceries in the Boutiquie Dean and de Luca market nearby on Broadway, Bowie could often be found browsing the rows of books
at McNally Jackson's. It was like he was back in Berlin, strolling with no security, grabbing coffee at his regular cafe, running into his neighbor Moby in the corner deli. He'd still go to concerts on occasion, anointing the new breed of NYC bands like The Strokes, Interpoll and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs with a backstage visit, but for the most part he was a homebody by his own admission. Having a family and sticking around to be present for it level amount moving him from a life of action to
one of contemplation and reflection. This retrospective mood is apparent on David's new project, an album revisiting early songs he wrote back in the mid sixties called Toy. The proposed album included Liza Jane, the first recording had ever released back in Other titles like Hole in the Ground were of a similar vintage, but never recorded. Label troubles would halt the album indefinitely. Those some tracks would trickle out
as B sides or bonus songs. Well, much of it leaked out on the internet in too many it remains something approaching the Great Lost Bowie album. The experience left a bitter taste in Bowie's mouth, leading to his departure from his label soon after, but the Toy recording rekindle a working relationship with Tony Visconti, David's longtime friend and collaborator.
The two had fallen out just prior to two s Let's Dance Sessions, when David rather rudely booted him as co producer in favor of Nile Rodgers just weeks before recording was due to begin. Stung by the rejection, Visconti refused David's invitation to mix sound for the resulting Serious Moonlight Tour. Sure, the thinking went, give the hot shot producer the glamour and leave me with the grunt work.
They didn't speak for a while after that. They came together briefly to work on a song for the soundtrack to Nickelodeon's The Rugrats movie, but the scene for the song was cut and the track was amazingly dropped during the Toy sessions. A few years later, David revived let Me Sleep Beside You, an obscure nineteen sixty seven track that has the distinction of being the first song he
and Visconti ever worked on together. Visconti wrote a new string arrangement, which led to a coffee date, which led to plans to make their first new album together in twenty two years. In June of two thousand one, the pair traveled the Visconti's drafty country home and upstate New York workshopping songs like they had in the basement of Hadden Hall all those years ago. Then they got to work at a large studios, a recording facility in a former luxury estate, carved into the high peaks of the
cat Skills. The vaulted wooden ceilings made it look like a rustic cathedral. David couldn't help but be inspired by the god's eye view of the mountains and reservoir. Outside the massive picture windows. He could see for miles clear through to Manhattan. Deer roamed the grounds while eagles kept watch overhead. David traditionally derived his inspiration from urban environments, but something about the stark natural scenery spoke to him
the moment he arrived. He later said, I knew exactly what lyrics I was to write, although I didn't yet know what the words themselves were. They came to him early one morning. David had a habit of arriving at the studio at sunrise to gather his thoughts alone, gazing out the window at the deer grazing in the pre dawn haze. He had an experience. The precise word for it differs across cultures and theologies oneness, wholeness, enlightenment, loving, awareness, nirvana, zen.
It washed over him like a warm wave. The beauty and fragility of existence became so clear. I couldn't believe this was happening to me. David would recall the serenity and the majesty of it, How beautiful the world is. It all started coming in, and I honed in and what it was I really had to say about my life. It was magical. Words began pouring out of him. His tears streamed down his face. He didn't want to write what he had to a but he had to. The
feeling was odd, like someone else was guiding him. He would describe the moment as a traumatic epiphany. His hard won happiness was tempered by the irrefutable fact that everything is temporary. It's a head spinning dichotomy, He'd say, the lust for life against the finality of everything. Those two things raging against each other that produces these moments that
feel like real truth. The words would form the basis of a new song, Heathen At first past, the lyrics appear to be a man leaving a lover, but the object he addresses his life Heathen is about knowing you're dying, David explained. It's a dialogue between a man and life itself. It's a man confronting the realization that life is a finite thing and that he can already feel it actually going from him, ebbing out of him, the weakening of age.
It was more than just a little autobiographical. There are times in our quiet lives when we're very happy, he'd say, But there comes a point when you're not growing anymore and your body's strength is diminishing. Especially in one's mid fifties, you're very aware that that's the moment you have to leave the idea of being young. You've got to let it go. There was a nursery rhyme David remembered from his childhood. This is the way the young men ride,
clip clop, clip clop, clip clop, clip clop. It starts, then it ends with this is the way the old men ride, hobbily, hobbily, hobbily down into the ditch. David was keenly aware that these days he rode like an old man. I wanted to give some sense of what happens when you arrive at this stage, he said, do you still have doubts? Do you still have questions and fears? And does everything burn with as much luminosity as it did when you were young? It was the inverse of nihilism.
This was gratitude. In his youth, he had often gambled with his life. Now those days were behind him, he wanted to stay. I love this work, he said, I love this life. I'm so greedy not to want to give it up. I just don't want to give it up. It's hard to give it up. Heathen would become the title track for his new album. For the first time since The Buddha of Suburbia. David wrote all the new material himself. The songs reflected David's tumultuous year in which
he lost a parent and became one again. The autumnal lyrics grappled with feelings of loss, isolation, abandonment, and uncertainty by David's own estimation. All of us work dealt with these same themes, all of the high points of one's life. He'd note Briley his greatest strength as a writer was his ability, due to capture transitory nagging fear. It was the dread that had defined his existence, the possibility that there was no true spiritual life. The concept of heathen
is a godless century. Tony Visconti observed he was addressing the bleakness of our soul and possibly his own soul. The songs on Heathen would be colored by a national tragedy, one that hit terrifyingly close to home for David. He was upstayed in the studio one Tuesday morning in September when he saw the news that a jet liner had
flown into one of the World Trade Center towers. He immediately called him on back in their downtown apartment, where she could see the building burn from their kitchen window. They were on the phone when she saw a second plane hit the tower. You're under attack, David said, get out of there. Iman bundled Lexie and her stroller and ran uptown to seek shelter at a friend's apartment. The phone lines were jammed across the city, and for the rest of the day, David didn't know whether his wife
and daughter were still alive. It was so so horrifying, he would say, it was incredibly traumatic, one of the nastiest days of my life. From the studio window, David watched the orange smoke in the distance Snake towards the Sky. The events of September eleventh gave extra residence to David's powerful lyrics. The album was greeted with near universal praise
upon its release in June of two thousand two. His best albums since Scary Monsters had been a familiar refrain throughout his nineties creative resurgence, but now the lines seemed to fit. David's modest tour featured concerts in each of New York's five boroughs, an expression of love and thanks for his grieving adopted home. His next album, two thousand threes, Reality, was steeped in the urban angst of Manhattan. To promoted, he planned an epic nine month, one hundred and twelve
date trek across Europe, America, Asia and Australia. At age fifty six, it was an unusual time to embark on the longest, most grueling tour of his career, but then again, he was in the best shape of his life. Drugs were long gone, plus he'd given up booze and kicked cigarettes. He watched what he ate with the help of a private chef, and he was working out boxing multiple times
a week with a trainer. With his casual sneakers and skin tight black T shirt that showed off his slender frame, he barely looked forty, but Tony Visconti sensed he was tired before the tour launched that October. As the concerts progressed, his body began to rebel. In November, he canceled a show due to laryngitis, and the first leg of the US tour was delayed for a week when he came down with the flu. But this was all just a
precursor what was to come. For years, David denied rumors of a secret cocaine induced heart attack delightful but untrue. He'd insist, it's very romantic, but I've got a very sound heart. But intimates, including Reeves Gabrels, claimed that he often complained of chest pains on tour, but swore one and all of secrecy. David didn't want to worry him on but in June of two thousand and four it became too much. On June, he ended a gig in Prague early due to a shooting pain and his left shoulder.
A tour doctor told him it was a trapped nerve and gave him the all clear to continue two days later at the Hurricane Festival in Germany. The set seemed normal to his band well, maybe not as energetic as some of his previous performances. He ended his encore with ziggy stardust Zo to his alter ego, His Nemesis, his Dream Brother. It was note perfect. After taking his bows, David climbed off the stage and collapsed in agony. An
ambulance was summoned and took him away. A German doctor determined that it wasn't a trapped nerve that was bothering him, but a blocked artery in his heart. They advised an emergency angioplasty and put David under. As he drifted away from the anesthesia, he must have been amused. The first time he'd seen his hero A Little Richard perform, Richard had feigned a heart attack mid song for dramatic effect. Now David had the real thing, and he didn't miss
a beat. His bandmates looked on in disbelief as David's ambulance sped off. The remaining tour dates were canceled. They were going home. A few realized it, but David Bowie had just given his last concert off The record is a production of I Heart Radio. The executive producers are Noel Brown and Shan ty Tone. The supervising producers are
Taylor Chicogne and Trista McNeil. The show was researched, written and hosted by me Jordan run Talk and edited, scored and sound designed by Taylor she coogn and Trista McNeil, with additional music by Evan Tyre. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.