The era David Bowie thought was too bizarre to work: “I don’t know where I was at”
Not every rock band can claim to knock it out of the park the first time they make a record. All great albums are a learning process for everyone involved, and that includes the person who’s writing every tune trying to see what approach works and what is best left in the rearview. Then again, David Bowie didn’t seem to take long to leave his hits in the past, but he was experienced enough to realise when he was dealing with a great song or an absolute trainwreck.
When anyone is working in Bowie’s field, nothing they ever make will be considered merely boring. Anyone can come up with something that’s boring, but seeing ‘The Starman’ take on roles that were outside of his comfort zone usually led to something that made him look absolutely ridiculous or a god amongst musicians and very little in-between.
While Outside and Earthling were a great way for ‘The Thin White Duke’ to mix things up in his later career, it was bound to be a breath of fresh air after the 1980s crashed and burned for him with Never Let Me Down. There are many things to love about Bowie’s ‘Phil Collins years’, but there are more often those few moments that remind everyone why Collins was so reviled back in the day as well.
But if you want to see Bowie look truly lost, we have to go back to the very beginning. Even though his unofficial debut saw him voyaging off to new lands as Major Tom in ‘Space Oddity’, that’s only what Bowie wanted you to think. In a pre-Sgt Pepper era, he had aspirations to be a vaudeville musician on his official debut, which sounded like a half-hearted attempt to sound somewhere between The Monkees and some cheap sideshow performer.
Of all the songs from his early years, though, ‘The Laughing Gnome’ may be the most indicative of this style. Everything about Bowie’s melody writing is accounted for, but it’s hard to take it seriously when he starts to take on an altered voice that makes him sound like a rejected member of Alvin and the Chipmunks.
And while that single eventually went out of print, Bowie was happy to leave that side of himself in the past, saying, “How cringey. No, I haven’t much to say about that in its favour. Lyrically I guess it was really striving to be something, the short storyteller. Musically, it’s quite bizarre. I don’t know where I was at. It seemed to have its roots all over the place, in rock and vaudeville and music hall, and I don’t know what. I didn’t know if I was Max Miller or Elvis Presley.”
Even if Bowie looks at that period in the same way that most of us look at old photos of ourselves in high school, ‘The Laughing Gnome’ is the closest thing to a memorable track to come out of that period. It’s not good by any means, but when choosing between this and something as anaemic as ‘Love You Till Tuesday,’ this is at least more entertaining throughout its runtime.
But by the time Bowie started coming out with records like Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust, this kind of music may as well have been a completely different world. Most artists can try their best to grow over time, but in Bowie’s case, the journey from his first era to becoming rock and roll’s glam rock god was less of a growth and more of a full-on transformation.
