“Absolutely awful”: The performances David Bowie hated singing on
Most musicians know how to be professional when facing the darkest days of their lives. No matter how much time they might be hurting in between going onstage, it’s important to give 100% to fans who paid good money to see you wow them. While David Bowie could have easily played for any paying crowd for as long as he could, he admitted that one particular theatrical stint was marred by tragedies going on in the background.
Bowie had been no stranger to putting the dark side of himself right into his art. Considering the amount of drugs that he was taking right before moving to Berlin, ‘The Thin White Duke’ was seen as the dark alter ego of Bowie, especially when he started making claims that Hitler could have been one of the first rock stars.
Up until he faced mortality during Blackstar, Bowie still managed to turn everything into an art piece. Though everyone knew Bowie was dying, ‘The Starman’ knew that this one-man battle wouldn’t happen without a little fight, and some of the record’s best moments revolved around him being unsure of himself but pushing on anyway.
There’s a certain bravery that comes with releasing an album of that stature, but Bowie got that bravery from all of his idols. Years before he had considered thinking outside the box, John Lennon was already among the few artists willing to push the envelope. Bob Dylan opened up the lyrical medium to something much more interesting, but Lennon took music in a similar direction, especially when he made the rock and roll complement to Alice in Wonderland, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.
Although Bowie was one of the few who could have considered Lennon a friend, his sudden murder in 1980 made time stop for a few minutes. Considering how many people saw The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show and had invited them into their homes whenever they played their music, this wasn’t another celebrity getting killed. This was a death in the family, and Bowie could hardly keep it together.
Bowie was in New York at the time working on the Broadway adaptation of The Elephant Man, but all the courage he could muster to get on that stage, eventually telling Rolling Stone, “The handful of performances after that were absolutely awful. A whole piece of my life seemed to be taken away; a whole reason for me being a singer and a songwriter had been removed. It was almost like a warning. It was saying: ‘We’ve got to do something about our situation on Earth.’”
The glam rock superstar had done various tributes beforehand, but Lennon’s memory and need to reinvent himself is something he carried with him throughout the rest of his career. When he sculpted himself into a plastic pop star on Let’s Dance, Bowie kept all the values that Lennon instilled in him on each album, usually trying his best to create something that no one had ever heard, even if it was atrocious like on Never Let Me Down.
While fans were only given The Beatles Anthology and a handful of demos that Lennon had lying around after his murder, his murder was far from the end of his relevance. If anything, considering where modern music would be going, Lennon was one of many artists who revelled in bending pop music into different shapes the same way indie rockers and art rockers do now.
