The artist John Lennon believed could change a way of life: “He is the message”
You can’t account for timing. The Beatles were timed so perfectly that they made Mussolini’s trains seem scatty. When Ozzy Osbourne assessed their impact, he proclaimed, “It was like going to bed in a black and white world and waking up, and it turned to colour.” Such a Promethean impact was surely helped along by the fact that they literally arose at the point where colour TV and print was breaking into the affordable mainstream for the first time.
After the scourge of the gruesome Second World War, a time so black and white it retrospectively seems like a lot more than a couple of decades away from ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’, yet it was, in fact, closer than Franz Ferdinand’s ‘Take Me Out’ is to the present, the fresh and vibrant Fab Four formulated a fitting revolution in response. Spearheaded by the wry wit and ballsy bolshevism of John Lennon, kids had a new working-class hero to celebrate, and he helped to change music in an overnight whirlwind.
By the time he waved goodbye to The Beatles, the world had seen immense upheaval unfurl in a matter of years: Presidents had been assassinated, wars had rumbled on, the National Gaurd had slain peaceful protestors, man had walked on the moon, TVs infiltrated livings rooms all over the land, civil rights movements made strides but sadly suffered the setbacks of their own assassinations, cults embroiled culture in chaos, the arts took a psychedelic trip, and on and on in a breakneck blur of breathtaking moments adding an immediacy to the proletariats involvement in party life.
Ozzy mightn’t have seen colours before 1962, but eight years later, he no doubt felt that he had seen it all. Enter the only man who could provide something new under the sun…there is a moment in everyone’s childhood when the floor is just about pulled out from under them, and the dangerous precipice of the future presents itself. Often, the cultural slap across the chops of music coaxes this presentiment to the fore. For millions of kids who had narrowly missed out on the 1960s and a fair few of those still reeling from it, David Bowie’s appearance on Top of the Pops provided the next great rug pull.
With one lanky finger, he unzipped the TV screen and welcomed a million bewildered eyes into his otherworldly oeuvre. From that moment on, life wouldn’t just change for the enamoured youngsters watching on but for all of us—the reverberating ripples are still shaping things to this day. In fact, from arts and crafts fares, where his face makes up 90% of the merchandise, to new pop stars in drag, the breadcrumb trail of modern culture back to Bowie is as easy as following the Great Wall of China to Gansu. If we sparkle, it’s probably observable from space.
As the leading baton passer, Lennon wasn’t blind to this—in his view, Bowie wasn’t just revolutionary, he was a revolution. “Well, if you get Bowie on TV and somebody switches on in Ohio or Bradford and they see this person looking out at them, it’s going to affect their whole way of life,” he told New Musical Express in ’74. “He doesn’t have to say Power To The People Right On. He is the message in himself. It’s like holding a mirror up to society. It makes people react in a specific way that’s better than having them half dead listening to Sandy McPherson.”
As it happens, in the cyclical swirl of culture, Bowie actually pried a lot of this daring effrontery from Lennon himself. “He was one of the major influences on my music life. I just thought he was the very best of what could be done with rock ‘n’ roll, and also ideas,” he added. “I felt such akin to him in that he would rifle the avant-garde and look for ideas that were so on the outside of, on the periphery of what was the mainstream and then apply them in a functional manner to something that was considered popularist and make it work.”
This is precisely what Bowie was looking to channel as he pored over the darkened psychology of dictators or made bold remarks about sexuality on TV. “He would make it work for the masses and I thought that was so admirable,” the Starman continued. “That was making artwork for the people and not making it elitist.” Bowie dug the same approach of being society’s more extreme palatable presence, the Vindaloo of culture, if you will.
The beauty of the ‘Starman’ melody is almost lost amid the commotion that it caused that night on Top of the Pops. It was quite simply pop perfection, but pop perfection had already been done by 1972. There was something different about this pristine example. There was something more to it. It was outrageous. In the same way that the most popular band of the age releasing ‘I Am the Walrus’ was a maddening trip, Bowie waltzing onto the stage of the biggest TV show in Britain like a species who had just fallen to Earth was shocking in the extreme, but the sweetness of ‘Starman’ sugared the life-changing red pill.
Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin had not long died, The Beatles had split, and Lennon and Paul McCartney were marooned on separate sides of the big Atlantic pond, Altamont had shrouded The Rolling Stones in darkness, and Charles Manson had upended the idealism of counterculture. But here was a new force—a strange androgynous force that nobody had yet dared to be, and from his appearance and attitude alone, he was raising pertinent questions about a society steadily being shackled back up after Beatlemania.
Lennon thought this was vital. “If they can separate all the big names in pop they effectively cut off the, quotes, ‘revolution’ at its source. No more Woodstocks. No more mass gatherings. The real changes aren’t gonna come from politicians. It’s going to come from the artists and musicians,” he said. His words echo those of William S Burroughs before him, who said, “Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.”
Lennon added, “Bowie is a threat in a way”. Indeed, he elicited questions about society’s sensibilities and forced fans to club in with the wider realm of bohemian culture he had just opened up like Pandora’s Box. He was the revolution in the sense that he was revolutionary, but also because his startling image represented more than just himself, as Lennon alluded, it rounded up all the culture that had inspired him and became a great force as a result. The Fab Four had condensed into one new Starman, and Lennon thought he was just as vital.
