“Beyond the man voice”: Bono on the artist who introduced him to high singing
Most artists have a defining moment that separates them from being amateurs and turns them into true musicians. They may have been looking to just play music for fun in between their day jobs, but usually, a certain musician will come around that will turn their life in a different direction and make them realise that their songs are the reason why they were put on this Earth. While most people see the impact U2 has had as a religious experience in some respects, Bono admitted having a revelation about singing when hearing David Bowie.
Looking back at the kind of musicians in the group, though, not all of them seemed to have the same musical taste at any one time. Whereas they had a common love of the punk revolution, Bono wasted no time in saying that The Edge’s fascination with bands like Yes was nothing but wasting time trying to make music seem more self-righteous.
While the idea of playing down self-righteousness sounds more than a little bit ironic coming out of the guy with one of the biggest messianic complexes in music history, Bono still at least tried to keep his feet on the ground while he had his head in the clouds. What he saw in U2 was carrying on the tradition of harnessing music, but David Bowie may as well have been a musical magician compared to what they were doing.
From the first time he crashlanded on Earth, Bowie was interested in making music that shook people up in a much different way than Elvis Presley did. He had a great deal of respect for the old guard, but listening to ‘Space Oddity’, he didn’t really intend to copy them, either. Especially when he started adopting the Ziggy Stardust persona, no one had seen anything like Bowie, and even when the rest of the rock world came in to ride his coattails, he had already switched to something completely different.
And it’s not like he didn’t have his roots in punk rock, either. He had idolised Iggy Pop long before acts like The Clash and Sex Pistols came to town, and looking at the raw energy behind ‘Hang On To Yourself’ or ‘Cracked Actor’, Bowie was well ahead of the curve in terms of getting just the right sound for angsty rock and roll.
Beyond just the music, Bono said that Bowie’s singing style and approach to the stage was what made them dream bigger, saying, “He introduced us to the high singing beyond the ‘man’ voice, into the feminine. And there’s the staging, the attempts to be innovative. Bowie wasn’t afraid to use scale to dramatise things.”
Even when U2 began dismantling what made their sound unique on Achtung Baby, Bowie was there to prove he could do even better than that. No matter how polish is put on tunes like ‘Zoo Station’, there’s no way that they could have competed with ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’ once Pop came out.
That said, it’s not like Bono was ever trying to one-up Bowie in any respect. Many of us can try to compete with what ‘The Starman’ had covered, but even if the Irish legends had started a few years earlier, they would still be nowhere close to the boundaries Bowie was breaking every time he sang a tune.
