The song David Bowie always wished he could have performed live: “Don’t even think about it”
As David Bowie unknowingly hurtled towards the final throes of his life, it didn’t seem like he held many regrets as to the way in which his stratospheric career had panned out.
Although this most obviously hadn’t been without its bumps along the way, latterly the Starman had finally landed back to Earth and found a sense of contentment in his life: the years of touring and recording were swapped for relatively quiet domesticity in New York with his wife and young child, having seemingly learned that the truly most important aspect of his world was not the fame and the fortune, but his family.
There had, of course, been some close calls in order to put things into perspective. He had suffered a heart attack while performing in Germany in 2004, and despite some rock stars peddling out the mantra that they wish to die on stage, when actually looking down the barrel of death, Bowie realised this was never what he really wanted. Thankfully, he did manage to recover, but it meant some things had to change – and fast.
Beyond cancelling the immediate issue of the rest of the dates on that tour, longer-term, it also sadly meant that Bowie was never able to perform live again. The repercussions were seismic, as it ultimately led him into an almost decade-long period of artistic drought, leaving many fans to fear whether they would ever hear from him again. But then one day, in the early 2010s, something changed, and that ember of creativity ignited once again.
The result was The Next Day in 2013, followed by the swan song Blackstar days before his death in 2016, signalling the final chapter of Bowie’s life in which music returned to his essential lifeblood. The pair of albums was instantly considered some of the pinnacle works of an already unfathomable career, and as such, that pang for the stage still called, despite him knowing that it was never going to do him any good.
The man responsible for purveying some of Bowie’s wildest dreams was Earl Slick, the guitarist who had been by his side that fateful night in Hamburg but also returned to record The Next Day. It was laying down the recording for one particular track, however, that truly lit the fuse.
“We were working on The Next Day; just as I finished up my work on the track ‘Set the World on Fire’,” Slick recalled. “We were listening back in the control room, and he looks at me and goes, ‘This would just kick ass live’. I looked at him ready to say something, and he goes, ‘Don’t even think about it.’”
It might have seemed like a fantasy landing with a resolute and pessimistic crash, but the truth was that if Bowie had any hope of continuing to make music through the final years of his life, touring would have never been the answer. The notion may have seemed romantic and alluring at first, but with the gruelling schedule of travel and performance, it was too much of a mountain to climb.
It didn’t stop him from allowing himself to dream, though, with the muse of ‘Set the World on Fire’ being the perfect vision of dominating power he always knew he could yield in his grasp.
