Though the current project started as a series of posts charting my grief journey after the death of my mother, I am no longer actively grieving. Now, the blog charts a conversation in living, mainly whatever I want it to be. This is an activity that goes well with the theme of this blog (updated 2018). The Sense of Doubt blog is dedicated to my motto: EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY. I promote questioning everything because just when I think I know something is concrete, I find out that it’s not.
Hey, Mom! The Explanation.
Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.
Thirty years ago today, David Bowie released the soundtrack of The Buddha of Suburbia, a four-part serial which was, at the time, being aired on Wednesday nights on BBC2. More accurately, this record was billed as the soundtrack, complete with a cover photo of a seemingly crucified Naveen Andrews, with Bowie’s name given as much prominence as that of his co-producer David Richards (he did get the back cover, however).
The record got little notice in the British press, where it was mostly treated as an inconsequential bonus to the telefilm; the concurrent release of the BowieSinglesCollection got as much, if not more, attention. It got close to zero notice in the United States, where the film wasn’t shown and the album wasn’t released (it wouldn’t appear until 1995).
But it was not quite a soundtrack (Buddha had prominently used “Time” and “Fill Your Heart,” neither of which appeared on the record, and the only thing that one might have recognized from the show was the title track). It was, in truth, the erasure and deconstruction of a soundtrack: a secret album that Bowie slipped out at the end of 1993. Bowie always said that it was one of his favorites, and it remains one of mine.
It had started with Hanif Kureishi, who wrote the Buddha of Suburbia novel and its TV adaptation. He and Bowie had gone to the same school, Bromley Tech, and both were Bromleyites, if of crucially distinct generational subsets. Bowie (born early 1947) had grown up in a Bromley which had changed little from when H.G. Wells had lived there. Kureishi (born late 1954) had grown up in a Bromley whose most famous escapee was David Bowie. Both, however, had the same arts teacher: Owen Frampton, father of Peter.
The two met in early 1993 for Interview, a conversation that touched often upon Bromley. Bowie was in a nostalgic mood, having helped to compile an issue ofArenathat cataloged his past and giving a Rolling Stone interviewer a guided tour of London and its suburbs. Kureishi said he was adapting his novel for television and asked Bowie for permission to use some songs. Bowie agreed. Working up the nerve, Kureishi then asked Bowie if he felt like contributing any original material. A few months later, Kureishi and his director/co-writer Roger Michell were in Switzerland, listening to Bowie’s score for the series.
His incidental music was greatly motifs—combinations of guitar, synthesizer, trumpet, percussion, sitar. Kureishi found it surreal to watch his film, a fictional document of his adolescence, playing on a TV monitor while the idol of his adolescence worked the mixing desk; he also found it daunting to tell his idol that the music wasn’t quite right.
After revising the soundtrack, Bowie thought he could rework some of the pieces into a new album. “He said he wanted to write some songs for it because he wanted to make some money out of it,” Kureishi recalled to Dylan Jones. (Bowie was perpetually surprised to discover how poorly the BBC paid.)
During his nostalgic turns in early 1993, Bowie had mused whether he could make a fourth “Berlin” album out of scattered pieces of his and Eno’s trilogy, a falsified Lost Berlin Tapes album that “never existed.” Not long before, Ryko had reissued the “Berlin” albums on CD, featuring allegedly lost outtake bonus tracks like “I Pray Olé” and “Abdulmajid.” These, in truth, were trial runs, with Bowie taking some bits from late Seventies sessions and compositions and fashioning essentially new tracks out of them. On Buddha of Suburbia, he’d do the same with his soundtrack motifs, fusing them into new shapes.
Relying on his usual jack-of-all-trades, the Turkish musician Erdal Kızılçay, Bowie worked at Mountain Studios in Montreux in the summer of 1993 to extend the Buddha motifs into six- or eight-minute loops, isolating their “dangerous or attractive elements,” then recording vocals and instrumental lines over said elements. After a week’s recording and a fortnight of mixing, he had a fifty-minute album.
Bowie had found in Kureishi’s novel an observation that he felt rang true: a curse of being a suburban artist is a self-conflicted ambition, a need to feel you’re bettering yourself while fearing being found out as a fraud. “It’s a miracle,” Bowie once told Tin Machine guitarist Eric Schermerhorn, as their tour bus went through Brixton. “I probably should have been an accountant. I don’t know how this all happened.”
Once asked why Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four had been so influential on his work, Bowie said “for those of us born in South London, you always felt like you were in [the novel]. That’s the kind of gloom and immovable society that a lot of us felt we grew up in.” The Buddha characters who thrive are those who transform themselves, like the protagonist Karim; those who wither, like Karim’s fundamentalist uncle Anwar, are those who can’t shake free of the past. Yet in Buddha this self-transformation, this multi-ethnic suburban counterculture, is ultimately twinned with Thatcherism—novel and series end on the night of the general election in 1979. The ferment generated by suburban hippies and punks parallels the economic “liberation” of Thatcher. The revolution, when it comes, will be a suburban one.
The Buddha film had lovingly recreated early Seventies Bromley for Bowie. For his new songs, he said that he drew from what he called a “personal memory stock” ranging from his teenage years through the late Seventies in Berlin. His Buddha would be impressionist autobiography. As he wrote in his liner notes, “a major chief obstacle to the evolution of music has been the almost redundant narrative form. To rely upon this old war-horse can only continue the spiral into the British constraint of insularity. Maybe we could finally relegate the straightforward narrative to the past.”
Daily Telegraph, 13 November 1993
There was “South Horizon,” a join-piece of “trad” and “acid” jazz, featuring one of Mike Garson’s loveliest piano solos. Devoting as much care to the spaces between notes as to the notes he plays, Garson closes with a fractured lullaby on his highest keys. On his “Aladdin Sane” solo, Garson sounded like he’d soaked up every speck of music he’d ever heard and was able to reproduce it at will, like God’s player piano. His work here is more concise, conciliatory. He often keeps silent, or hints at some greater pattern.
The wonderfully odd “Sex and the Church.” The cold beauties of “The Mysteries,” an instrumental worthy of the Berlin years (which Brett Morgen used well on his Moonage Daydream). The only dud for me is “Bleed Like a Craze, Dad” which sounds like the sort of thing you get when you ask a random rock trio using your studio to jam with you for an afternoon.
Its finest tracks include the giddy “Dead Against It,” which Bowie considered revising for 1. Outside and Earthling. It’s the track that most sounds like its making: Bowie and Kızılçay camped out in the studio, eating hamburgers and listening to Prince, making odd little sketches.
Three lengthy instrumental stretches bookend and break up verses and refrains—an arpeggiated synthesizer line is answered by one on guitar. Bowie’s larking vocal is full of ascending phrases, sinking when reality sets in (“begins to sigh,” “my words are worn”). His lyric is clotted with internal rhymes and consonance: “I couldn’t cope/ or’d hope eloped/ a dope she roped.” There’s a barb in this spun sugar—he stares at her while she sleeps; she reads to avoid talking to him but talks to strangers on the phone—but it’s lost in the blissful waves of guitars that close out the track.
The melodic bounty of “Untitled No. 1” and the intriguing severity of its sister, “Ian Fish, U.K. Heir.” Where “Ian Fish” is an ebbing—what’s left when the tub’s drained—”Untitled No. 1” is the waters rushing in. The little melodies that Bowie and Kızılçay keep adding, like spinning plates upon a table; a rising scale figure answered by groaning bass, like sunlight rousing a sleeper; the stately entrance of the synthesizers; the swirling synth figures in the breaks; Bowie’s warm, adhesive ooooohs; the guitarist playing a line so entrancing that he won’t let it go, sounding its last notes again and again; the jangling countermelody to the opening scale motif that becomes a barrelhouse piano line. The saxophone line at the end of the first verse, soon bestowed on piano and keyboards. The breakdown into a quasi-Indian dance track until a guitar strums things to a close.
Two verses and a refrain of blur-words, cut to fit the generous spread of music: “Now we’re swimming rock [farther?/harder?] with [the doll?/the gull?] by our sides.” An indecipherable chorus hook: Sleepy Capo? Cynical Fool? Shammi Kapoor? (the first word in particular mutates throughout). A prayer is buried in the second verse.
A bleating vocal suggests that Bowie’s again lovingly parodying his lost friend, Marc Bolan. A tribute that more honors the living, the gracious hours that we have left to us. Its most distinctly-phrased words are “it’s clear that some things never take” and “never never.” “Untitled No. 1” burgeons. There were a few times where Bowie could have stood up and never recorded again: eddies of finality in which everything reconciled for a moment. This is one of them.
Bowie, Bromley Spheres, 1993
“Ian Fish”: I was too dismissive of the track when I first wrote about it, a decade ago now, and earned an incisive response at the time by Magnus Genioso, whose ears were far better:
“Imagine for a moment that the guitar is not there, then turn the backing tracks way, way up. There’s a lot of information there. The bells at the beginning of the track. The rainy “street” white noise that adds the high frequency information. Not one, but two layers of reversed vocals, one of them with an actual harmony part. Several layers of keyboards, two ambient drones in different octaves along with some slight shimmers. What appears to be a harp-like plucking part at the two minute mark. You can hear best just how many instruments there are at the very end of the song as they all fall apart one by one.”
Most of all there’s “Strangers When We Meet,” a strong composition that Bowie knew he’d buried here and so remade it for 1. Outside two years later. I prefer this earlier version, whose emotional charge comes in part from how it questions and undermines the elated mood of Bowie’s then-recent “wedding” album Black Tie White Noise— it’s what had to be buried before the wedding.
As a title, “Strangers When We Meet” references a Kirk Douglas film about secret lovers who need to part to preserve their marriages. They meet one last time in the empty house that Douglas, an architect, has built and get mistaken as husband and wife. Bowie draws on this, and on the broken couple of “Heroes”—a pair so consumed by passive-aggressive emotional violence that they no longer recognize each other.
In “Heroes,” the act of being together is courageous. Here’s the other side of it—a relationship that survives out of habit, the cowardice of someone knowing the match won’t work but refusing to admit it. A union never to be blessed by a wedding. The TV’s a blank screen, as is the window (“splendid sunrise, but it’s a dying world”). The man weeps in bed, cringes when she tries to embrace him. By the final refrain, he welcomes this state: after all, if they’re strangers again, they could fall in love again.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2401.02 - 10:10
- Days ago = 3105 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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