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

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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. The demoing comes into its own in the late period, the particularity of the choices that David makes tended to get translated. Tony bought his own Zoom unit so he could figure out how to work with it. Reportedly David would say things like ‘I like the way I did it [on the demo], I don’t see why I have to do it again.’ So the demoing is bleeding into the end results.

CO: The recurrence of stars is another one. Towards the end, he’s playing with the idea of a star aging, or dying, like a red giant . Utterly fascinating dialogue. Gave me some good guidance and moral encouragement re: unavoidable creative gaps. A few thoughts, somewhere between all or none of which may be original to my brain: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 Pierrot in Turquoise or The Looking Glass Murders 1970. Directed by Brian Mahoney. Scottish Television David Bowie in Lindsay Kemp’s production of Pierrot in Turquoise. Photograph: Scottish Television 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 mention he’s even doing the scoring —again, this was something he always had to have Ronson or Visconti do—he’s even taking that in-house. Bowie, 2008: “I’ve never been keen on traditional musicals. I find it awfully hard to suspend my disbelief when dialogue is suddenly song. I suppose one of the few people who can make this work is Stephen Sondheim with works such as Assassins.“

Abstract

Being diagnosed with life-threatening/terminal illness is a cruel knowledge to receive; a paradoxical trade-off where one is forced to surrender knowledge of the future in exchange for the kind of unnatural knowledge no-one would want to possess – how much (or little) time there is left. The latter is almost like a combination of the first two in some ways. Fragmented lyrics pushed forward by propulsive rhythms, jazzy textures, and a minimalist kind of feel. CO: I have wondered what a full album of Bowie/Schneider would have been like, but I wonder if it was best as this one-off thing.

Definitely looking forward to reading this book and the connections made in it between Bowie’s last works and what came before. 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’. 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. 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.

Leah Kardos and ‘Blackstar Theory’: The Interview

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”. 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.