Pierrot: Who is David Bowie’s clown character?
In Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack and a parade of others, David Bowie tried on a lot of characters in the 1970s. As much a visual artist as a musical one, Bowie embraced the music video movement in the 1980s and continued putting on character costumes in his work.
One of his most famous and enduring costumes from the time is for a character he did not invent, but one that has become synonymous with his 1980 album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) nonetheless.
Pierrot is a stock character from pantomime and commedia dell’arte, an early form of French/Italian street theatre dating back to the 16th century. Pierrot first appeared in Molière’s Don Juan, or The Stone Guest (1665), and from his peasant origins, has gone on to become the ultimate tragic-comic clown. He is often portrayed pining after a lost love, especially for the affections of fellow stock character Columbine. He is said to have died the first truly tragic of the 19th century when, in one play, he is killed on his wedding day, having finally won himself a lover after 150 lonely years. He is characterised by his shocking white face paint, frilled and baggy white clothing, as well as his lonely air and lowly social status.
Before Bowie donned the makeup and costume on the cover of Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) and in the video for its lead single ‘Ashes to Ashes’, the Pierrot character had been embodied by countless clowns and mimes through the centuries, though most famously in depictions by Charles Deburau in the 19th century, who himself was later immortalised in a portrayal as a Pierrot based on Deburau’s work by Jean-Louis Barrault, in Marcel Carné’s 1945 film Les Enfants du Paradis.
And Ashes to Ashes wasn’t Bowie’s first courtship with the clown, either. In the 1960s, he undertook theatrical studies with actor, choreographer, mime artist and teacher Lindsay Kemp. Kemp, who would later go on to work with Kate Bush and help to inspire her groundbreaking visual work, was himself a protege of the acclaimed French mime Marcel Marceau, who was most famous for his portrayal of Bip the Clown.
In 1969, before he had really broken through as a singer and was still searching for his sound, Bowie recorded a mime segment titled The Mask as part of a promotional clip for his ‘Love You Til Tuesday’ project. With his frilled shirt and white face, he was already on his way to the role of Pierrot that he would really master 11 years later in the ‘Ashes to Ashes’ video.
Around this time, Bowie also took his mime act to the stage, opening shows for a young T-Rex with a silent performance which depicted China’s invasion of Tibet. He also made several references to clowns in the lyrics for a demo he wrote for Frank Sinatra, ‘Even a Fool Learns to Love’. True to the tragic Pierrot, Bowie’s live-mime performances did not go down well with the T-Rex crowd, and he was often booed off the stage, while his song for Sinatra was rejected out of hand by Ol’ Blue Eyes.
Perhaps those early rejections led Bowie to relate even further to the lonely clown, as he later told one interviewer, “I am Pierrot, I’m every man”.
In the modern day, the Pierrot character has not only recurred in Bowie’s own work but also featured heavily in the first season of the BBC’s excellent, Bowie-inspired Ashes to Ashes. Elsewhere, Jean-Louis Barrault’s performance in Les Enfants du Paradis is said to have inspired Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue make-up, whilst Pierrot has continued to appear in plenty of plays, paintings, movies and novels into the 20th and 21st centuries.
