The one artist David Bowie felt was too one-note: “I think he has confined himself”
The worst thing that any artist can be is predictable. It’s one thing for someone to have an identifiable sound and stick with it throughout the rest of their career, but there are often times when songs will either veer off into different directions or take on a different character that will keep everyone engaged a lot more than a simple rock and roll tune could. David Bowie practically made that state of change his entire personality, so when he saw someone intentionally restricting themselves, all he could see was wasted potential.
Because, throughout Bowie’s career, he knew never to make the mistake of staying in one place for too long. He may be labelled as one of the biggest names in glam rock and a pioneer of androgyny, but it’s hard to box him as one kind of innovator when he was constantly switching things up on records like Station to Station or targeting the pop market when making Let’s Dance.
Hell, if Bowie actually decided to keep doing the same thing every time he played, there’s a good chance ‘Major Tom’ wouldn’t have left Earth in the first place. The first vaudeville era of his work was certainly interesting, but had he been known as the kid strumming away on folksy tunes in the style of Syd Barrett, no one would be talking about him nowadays as one of the almighty legends of rock and roll.
By the time he reached the late 1970s, though, Bowie seemed to have left rock and roll behind altogether. He had had his fill of making something that organic, and there were many different avenues that he could go down when making records like Low and Lodger that weren’t necessarily indebted to guitars. But once Scary Monsters and Super Creeps came out, he unintentionally set the example for what synth-pop acts could sound like.
While there were also bands like New Order paving the way for the genre, it’s easy to see how tracks like ‘Ashes to Ashes’ and ‘Teenage Wildlife’ helped expand everyone’s palette in terms of what could be done with a synthesiser. So if Bowie could use it as a sonic costume for one album, Gary Numan felt he could make an entire career out of it, and ‘The Starman’ was less than thrilled with what he heard.
Even if we ignore the fact that Numan was pulling from the same image that Bowie was at the time, the former ‘Thin White Duke’ felt that all the man was doing was restraining himself, saying, “I think he encapsulated that whole feeling excellently. He really did a good job on that kind of stereotype, but I think therein lies his own particular confinement. I don’t know where he intends going or what he intends doing, but I think he has confined himself terrifically.”
Then again, Numan was far from the only person using synthesisers as their style of choice back in the day. As soon as the synths started to become prominent in the public eye, everyone from Duran Duran to The Cure would find ways to incorporate them into their music, even though both acts managed to take their sound a lot further than songs like ‘Cars’.
And looking at how Bowie would shy away from synthesised music after a while, it’s not like he wanted to make the same record twice like that. A world with a whole bunch of ‘Ashes to Ashes’-style songs would have been great, but would it really have been worth it if it meant not getting something like ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’ in the 1990s or letting Bowie say goodbye using jazz on Blackstar?
