“Some c**t in a clown suit”: The insult David Bowie was glad to recieve
Everyone needs to be brought back down to earth. Especially in the music world, and especially when it comes to a rock star, the threat of floating off into the ether of ego is high and routinely fatal. People get completely lost in it, becoming unable to separate the person and the celebrity, their life and the fame, themselves and the character they play on stage. For David Bowie, a man who spent his career moving from persona to persona, there was risk with every reinvention – but there was also seemingly always some perfectly timed comment from a stranger to keep him safe.
When we talk about artists adopting characters, Bowie comes to mind quickly. Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, The Thin White Duke; he had so many. In some moments, there seemed to be a faltering. Especially during the Thin White Duke era, while he was playing this substance-addicted bad guy amidst a period of intense addiction, there was definitely cause for concern that perhaps the line had blurred.
But maybe it did even without his input. Upon Bowie’s death, there was this repeated comment that he’d gone back up to space or returned to whatever planet he came from, continuing this idea that he was some supernatural creation, just like his earlier characters.
Bowie was David Robert Jones from Brixton. He was the son of a waitress and a charity worker. He was a kid who danced to Elvis songs, went to school, had friends, and got into fights. He was a human—a normal person. Even under the costumes and the fame, he stayed just that.
Part of that is thanks to his spirit, but part of it is thanks to the British public, who are always on hand to bring you down a couple of pegs.
It was 1980, and Bowie was rightfully triumphant. If there was going to be any one single moment where he lost his head, it would have been right here. Within a decade, and having only just entered his 30s, he’d made himself a sensation over and over and over. Ziggy had landed and left, he’d gone more avant garde after that, reached major mainstream success and cracked the states with his Young Americans era, and now he was only something new, returning to his early Major Tom figure but years on, reconsidering the landscape of glam from his new role as its leader, and from the position of the scene now seemingly being dead.
That’s what ‘Ashes to Ashes’ is about; “Ashes to ash and funk to funky / We know Major Tom’s a junkie / Strung out in heaven’s high / Hitting an all-time low,” Bowie sings, considering how all the heroes were crashing out while scenes were dying and the world was evolving. It was another observational masterpiece told through his unique eyes, and obviously, the visuals had to live up to it.
He handed on his outfit of choice: a clown suit, seemingly representing how he now felt about glam and these prior, more high-fashion characters he’d played. He wanted something uncanny and odd and, as always, he treated these decisions as high art.
The british public, however, don’t really give a shit about that. So when some random dog walker stumbles across Bowie and his backing actors making a music video in a park, all dressed in their garb, the reaction was never going to be “wow! What an incredible visual language to give to this interesting analysis of fame and culture.”
No, the reaction was, “It’s some c**t in a clown suit.”
As the video was being filmed, a man kept repeatedly appearing in the frame behind them as he walked through the park. The director, David Mallet, asked him politely to move, questioning him on if he knew who this, the strangely dressed obvious superstar, was. He said nah, to him it was just, once again, “some c**t in a clown suit.”
And you know what, Bowie needed that. “That was a huge moment for me,” Bowie reflected later on, genuinely recalling the moment as a necessary return to earth at the height of his success. He said, with exactly the humour of the normal man who lived under it all, “It put me back in my place and made me realise, ‘Yes, I’m just a c**t in a clown suit’.”
