The new wave band David Bowie was desperate to work with: “They’re extraordinary”
David Bowie wasn’t the kind of person who needed to play well with others to get what he wanted.
You could have put him in a studio with nothing but a handful of microphones, a guitar and a piano, and chances are he would have been able to come up with something much more adventurous than anyone else could have come up with. He didn’t need to be defined by those who were working beside him, but he knew when a band was doing something miles better than anything he could have imagined.
But in the late 1960s, the rock world really needed someone like ‘The Starman’ to come down. The genre wasn’t dying by any means, but when you look at where it was going, people were going to need to make something a lot more interesting than whatever the sad remnants of the Flower generation were doing. And once Bowie crashlanded on Earth for the first time with ‘Space Oddity’, he was basically alternative music years before that became a catch-all term for everything.
What Bowie did was light years ahead of his time in many respects, and when you look at the kind of avenues that he paved, half of the underground scene owed him a huge debt. He was the person who was built for the outsiders of the world, but that didn’t mean that the rest of the music world couldn’t go in more strange directions than he ever could. Bowie was the glam superstar, but the punk movement was responsible for tearing that kind of showmanship down.
Bowie wasn’t scared of punk rock by any means, but he was a lot more interested in what the sounds of new wave had to offer. Bringing in synthesisers felt like the next stage of musical development, but whereas bands like Talking Heads were creating more cerebral takes on pop music, Devo was the first band to actually sound like they were deconstructing what music was supposed to be.
Mark Mothersbaugh didn’t seem like the ideal punk rover by any means, but when listening to his tunes, you can definitely hear him trying to hit on something new. ‘Jocko Homo’ wasn’t the kind of song that any other rock and roll band was ever going to perform, and that kind of singularity was what drew Bowie to them when he first discovered them in the late 1970s.
Bowie lived for the kind of bands that didn’t seem to have any conventional structure, and when talking about his favourite new wave acts, he said that he would love to be able to record with the group if he had the opportunity, “Devo, [the] American band. They haven’t recorded anything yet, but they’re extraordinary. I’ve got to produce them. I’m very excited.” Then again, Devo always had a singular way of working that no one else could really grasp.
Even though many people have tried their best to make their own version of new wave, there aren’t very many that can be influenced by Devo without sounding like them. Even though every new wave band was trying to make their guitars sound a little bit more artificial-sounding, Devo is the sound of someone throwing everything they can at the wall and seeing what stuck, which doesn’t always make for the most comfortable listening experience when you’re looking for the traditional rock and roll tunes.
Nothing about the band was supposed to sound comfortable, but the reason why Mothersbaugh worked so well was that he was able to take the foundations of rock and do something a bit weirder with it. Bowie may not have understood it at first, but he did understand the idea of a band that was looking to go against the grain and thinking about music in ways that no one else had before.
