‘Recognising he had met his soul mate, he proposed to Iman pronto’
Joking about his ‘mad’ family. Admitting to being a ‘drunk’. And why marrying Angie was the ‘second biggest mistake’ of his life. The confessions of David Bowie, as told to ADRIAN DEEVOY
I’m David.’ He offered the same greeting each time, delivered with just a hint of a smile in his famously mismatched eyes. As if you didn’t know who he was. I first heard this deferential hello on a crisp morning in the early Eighties. Bowie was up a ladder that was leaning against the exterior of a pub in Maida Vale, London, and he was resplendent in orange overalls, pretending to be a window cleaner called Vic. But it was unmistakably Bowie. He was in London to work with director Julien Temple on a short film, Jazzin’ For Blue Jean, which would accompany his new single.
I met Bowie many times over 30-odd years, whether for official interviews, at concerts or on less formal occasions, and would soon learn that he was often in character.
To meet him was to encounter a fascinating bunch of people, or as he put it, ‘a group of one’.
Yet Bowie was always utterly charming, unnervingly intelligent, extremely funny but undeniably ‘other’.
By 1984 he had enjoyed unprecedented commercial success. But Bowie wasn’t enjoying it at all.
‘I floundered creatively,’ he told me years later. ‘I virtually lost my interest in music.’ During a break in the Blue Jean shoot, Bowie had sat down to chat about musicians he admired, displaying an encyclopaedic knowledge of any genre you cared to mention.
The conversation took in Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Philip Glass and Gustav Mahler. Wideranging didn’t cover it.
Later that day, Bowie described Blue Jean as ‘a piece of sexist rock ’n’ roll, about picking up birds’.
He then proceeded to chat up my mate’s girlfriend with alarming determination.
Twelve months later, Bowie was backstage at Live Aid He went on to give a passionate performance at Wembley Stadium. ‘Emotionally it was one of the greatest experiences of my career,’ he said afterwards. It was quite an admission for a man not overly given to sentiment.
Bowie was whipsmart and could work a room like he commanded a stage. But when the superstar headlights dimmed he could become anxious and rather remote.
He once half-joked that everyone believes their own family to be mad, but that his genuinely was.
Mental illness had left an indelible mark on his life. Six months before Live Aid, Bowie’s half brother Terry Burns – a long-term schizophrenic and the inspiration for the songs Aladdin Sane, All The Madmen, The Bewlay Brothers and, latterly, Jump They Say – killed himself at 47.
Yet, in person, Bowie could confound too. He opened one meeting by furiously shadow-boxing in a corner of the room. It shouldn’t have come as a shock, but he could be a bit weird. The most relaxed I saw him, other than as the lavishly loose-limbed entertainer we saw on stage, was at an art gallery in east London.
He was in his element at the exhibition and spoke professorially about a triptych entitled Rugby Posts which, to my untrained eye, was just nine pencil strokes on paper. I attended Bowie’s own low-key show at the London Astoria in 1999. At the after-show party in a Soho bar, our host seemed genuinely thrilled that his work had been so warmly received.
The room was so star-stuffed that, at one point, our group comprised Bowie, Pete Townshend, Mick Jagger and Bob Geldof, who were earnestly discussing the merits of well-made knitwear. Sweaters were strictly unnecessary when I joined Bowie on a sweltering New York night to sample the wares of Tin Machine. Experiencing Bowie’s newlyformed four-piece band explore the outer limits of experimental hard rock was difficult for all concerned. Not only was the playback of Tin Machine’s debut album deafeningly loud but the group’s frontman insisted on pacing up and down the small studio, smoking like a lunatic. As side one – this was 1989 – hissed to a halt, Bowie left the room and went to play pool with a bespectacled boy in the recess area. Upon closer inspection the youngster turned out to be a 14-year-old Sean Lennon. In her recent tribute to Bowie, Yoko Ono explained that he had become a ‘father figure’ to her son following John Lennon’s
death. Bowie only
HE WAS A BIG CON In 1998, Bowie was involved in novelist William Boyd’s hoax, Nat Tate, a book about an abstract expressionist who has disappeared. Bowie held a launch party for the book on April Fool’s Day eve, fooling many big names in the media.
returned to the recording studio’s control room once the music had finished. ‘That was like having an argument with your girlfriend in front of a crowd of people,’ he exhaled, overjoyed that the ordeal was over. ‘It was like, “Honey! Not here!” ’
I once bumped into a similarly stressed Bowie at the luggage carousel in JFK airport. He’d just flown in from Europe to promote his Earthling album.
A nervous flyer, he explained that he would have taken Concorde but if he went first class on a British Airways carrier, they’d sometimes let him smoke illicitly up at the back of the plane. Only this time they didn’t. ‘Bloody torture,’ he grumbled. Although romantically at least, Bowie was happy again. He had met Iman Mohamed Abdulmajid, a model from Mogadishu, Somalia, on a b date in 1990 at a time he was ‘as near to defea at any time in my life’. Recognising that he met his soul mate, Bowie proposed pronto decade later, Iman was gliding about backst at Madison Square Garden on the New Y date of her husband’s A Reality Tour Bowie too was in good hum acknowledging fans includ Lenny Kravitz and Jude Law dispensing bonhomie and bev ages with festive cheer. It a fortnight before Christm and although spirits were h Bowie was drinking herbal not having touched alcohol 20 years. When I asked why h sworn off the booze, he answe simply: ‘Because I’m a drunk.’ During the concert I sat along Iman up to the left of the stage. Touchin she sang along with admirable gusto to other half’s hits for almost all of the show.
HE’S THE CASTAWAYS’ FAVOURITE A total of 38 castaways chose a Bowie song on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. These include Ralph Fiennes (Ziggy Stardust), Charles Kennedy (Young Americans), Jeremy Clarkson (Heroes) and Brian Cox (Queen Bitch).