The Starman shines again
Five years,’ David Bowie sang at the start of Ziggy Stardust. ‘What a surprise.’ Next week marks five years since his death, which is only half-surprising. He remains ever-present, commemorated in every medium from musical theatre to museums, biopics to children’s books. Someone, somewhere, is surely writing Bowie: The Ballet.
Every January his backing musicians take his hits on tour; this year, undaunted, they’re doing a global live stream (next Sunday, at rollinglive studios.com/collections/bowie).
Meanwhile, Bowie keeps on releasing records. We’ve had 18 posthumous albums, including seven box sets, and here comes a new single, marking both the anniversary of his death and what would have been his 74th birthday. God only knows what his executors are saving up for his 75th.
To be fair, they’re good at quality control – arguably better than Bowie himself, who tended to feel that consistency was overrated.
This single, limited to 8,147 copies, is intriguing. It’s a double A-side, a phrase to make listeners of a certain age swoon. Both songs are covers, hitherto unreleased and recorded in 1997-98, when Bowie was a bit lost, en route from his flirtation with drum’n’bass on Earthling to the soft-rock mellowness of Hours.
Both songs are written by giants. Mother (1970) is John Lennon at his most Lennonish – turning his back on
The Beatles, undergoing primalscream therapy, making music of blazing starkness.
For Bowie, who preferred to be more artful, it’s a characteristically bold choice.
While his band strikes out towards southern soul, with Jordan Rudess starring on the piano, Bowie turns a child’s pain into bruised grandeur. He had covered Lennon before, singing Imagine on stage in Hong Kong in 1983, but this makes the more satisfying tribute.
Tryin’ To Get To Heaven (1997) is very different: Bob Dylan being not all that Dylanish. One of the more middling moments on Time Out Of Mind, it’s a wistful folk song with only one memorable line (‘tryin’ to get to heaven before they close the door’). Still, late Dylan is a gift to other singers, an invitation to surpass those scratchy mutterings.
Bowie’s version adds two dimensions to the original. His band, led in those days by the guitarist Reeves Gabrels, converts folk into rock – bigger, louder, heavier, longer. There’s an old-school screeching solo from Gabrels and, by way of contrast, a lovely murmuring bassline from Gail Ann Dorsey.
Bowie darts between the t wo approaches, like a good host trying to keep different guests happy. He starts off as subtle as the bass and ends up grandstanding like the guitar. Emotionally, he runs the gamut from tenderness to torment, and the fact that he’s no longer with us adds another layer of feeling.
On the two sides of this single, you can make out several sides of a great singer.
Mother/Tryin’ To Get To Heaven Out Friday