The awkward moment Perry Farrell angered his hero David Bowie
Whilst David Bowie can count many musicians as his disciples, including Gary Numan, Brian Molko and Shirley Manson, there’s an argument to be made that none are as individualistic as Perry Farrell. The Jane’s Addiction and Porno for Pyros frontman possess a voice that can only be described as polarising.
He’s capable of full-bodied, cerebral moments that whisk the listener away to celestial otherworlds, as well as highly visceral points where he sounds like a banshee, with his voice and Dave Navarro’s guitar converging to create a pulsating mass of air. Take Jane’s Addiction’s masterpiece, ‘Three Days’, for example. It’s no coincidence that their greatest track displays every facet of Farrell’s vocal style.
Like David Bowie, Farrell has drawn on a range of genres over his career, including metal, funk, electronica and even calypso. Duly, since he broke through in the late 1980s, he’s been immune to pigeonholing, this giving his career longevity. Ultimately, it has also provided the basis for the critical kudos he continues to receive.
Understandably, Farrell is a lifelong fan of David Bowie’s work, to the extent that before he joined his first outfit, the Los Angeles post-punks Psi Com in 1983, Farrell even performed as a Bowie impersonator. This meant that when he eventually came into the orbit of his hero years later, Farrell kicked himself extra hard when he pissed him off on two occasions.
The Jane’s Addiction frontman shared the anecdotes of irking Bowie during an appearance on The Howard Stern Show in May 2022. The revelation came as he sat down with his friend, Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan, to promote the tour that both bands were set to embark on later in the year.
“It was not like I was talking to him and said something wrong,” Farrell explained at the beginning of his account, recalling that the first incident happened when he forgot his Blackberry in a taxi to the airport. “The cab driver took it, and went through it, and saw David Bowie’s name, so he called him up: ‘Yo, David, it’s me!’ The guy kept calling him, and I had to finally say, ‘Listen man, it wasn’t me, I’m really sorry that this guy is bothering you, I left my phone in the cab.’ So he forgave me, right?”
“But this was also, the same time, the beginning of the internet,” Farrell said. “I didn’t know what a blind ‘CC’ copy was, on an email, so these people reached out to me to see if I would help them save this lake, and I got really excited about it, and I got all altruistic, like I’m gonna help the world here, and I thought, ‘I’m gonna see if David wants to do this too!'”
He continued: “So I sent him this thing and said, ‘David, you’ve gotta help me save the fish in Ontario!’… but what I didn’t realise was that there was 300 people on the [email] chain. So again, all these people started hitting him up, and again, he was like [miffed], ‘Perry, what are you doing?’ I said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m sorry!'”
Farrell concluded his account by clarifying that he did hope to apologise to Bowie in person at a 2016 concert the ‘Life on Mars’ singer was organising with his collaborator and producer Tony Visconti. However, Farrell didn’t get his wish, as Bowie passed away in January of that year, only two weeks before the show was scheduled.
