The classic album David Bowie told Courtney Love to stop playing
When I moved into my current flat, my downstairs neighbour took it upon himself to restrict every ounce of fun in my life. Phone calls about heavy footsteps were all too regular, and it eventually culminated in him buying me foam pads to put under my washing machine to soften the noise. Naturally, my music choices wreaked havoc over our neighbouring dynamics and I dreamed of a parallel universe where I lived next door to a musician. Imagine having David Bowie on the other side of a lightly plastered wall?
Well it wasn’t something Courtney Love had to imagine. She had the mercurial genius just one floor below her and as a musician herself, probably revelled at the opportunity to pick his brains. And even if that opportunity never arose then at least she could live safe in the knowledge that loud washing machines, heavy footsteps and music would at the very least be accepted and on good days, enjoyed.
But unfortunately, the cynical rumblings of middle-aged seemed to dig their fingers into Bowie, who was less than impressed with Love’s living habits. But he wasn’t so much bothered by the general noise so much as the source and in particular, Love’s appreciation for a truly classic album.
“So I lived under David Bowie, I’d never see him,” she explained. “I’m playing crazy music all day all night in this building, and it’s Sunday, and my friend Jane and her kid are over and we’re making crepes and playing some like brunch music, it’s a Sunday and Bernard the dormant calls and he’s like yeah, Mr Bowie really doesn’t like the noise, doesn’t like the music.” I’m like, ‘oh, it’s too loud? ‘No, he would prefer that you change the music’ and I was listening to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.”
She added, “I was like, ‘is this really happening?’ This is so Bowie on brand, like, no Fleetwood Mac. I bet you he didn’t like my Def Leppard and my Cheap Trick neither.”
While Bowie was never shy to share his dislike for certain musicians, Fleetwood Mac were relatively safe from catching any strays. But Rumours has always subtly been a point of contention within the higher echelons of music. In the 50 years since its release, it has been heralded by many as one of the most important records in all of music, showcasing great melodic composition and songwriting, while addressing a level of personal honesty rarely seen to that extent.
It shot the band to stardom in one of music’s most fruitful decades, and more specifically, a year packed with great albums. Rumours was the golden child of 1977, sadly eclipsing the importance of David Bowie’s Low to some. It was a seismic moment in Bowie’s career, an album that helped cement his legacy as a genre-bending experimentalist and proved he could take structural risks in his songwriting, yet still showcase the same sense of artistic coherence. Rumours’ greatness was arguably more accessible, while Bowie’s was perhaps more hidden and so hearing it through the creaky walls of an apartment building may have surfaced those feelings.
