Pop
Mr Panic
Duncan Fallowell
To all outward appearances David Bowie is the biggest thing to happen in British rock for five years. Since rock music at its centre is about violence and rebellion Bowie can claim to be an authentic' rock figure for he has legitimised for his youth audience erstwhile deviant behaviour, in much the same way as Presley and the Stones did before him. In stylistic terms alone his influence has been enormous, drawing particularly from the gay mentality for its more outrageous characteristics. What could be simpler than wearing make-up? It is certainly less difficult than trying to grow hair long when surroundings are hostile. Paint on boys still has a strong shock cachet and this marriage of shock and simplicity is very important, maintaining the creative tension between adolescent adventurousness and parental disapproval which produced rock in the first place. Given that people do not so much invent things as deploy them in original ways, Bowie is well regarded as the high priest of the vaseline waltz. This imagistic distinction yoked to a powerful songwriting faculty which anchors it in very fine pop records make his current stature no surprise. You cannot brush him aside when he has the tunes.
His British tour which opened
at Earl's Court last Saturday (and Closes there at the end of June) seems nonetheless to be taking on overtones of a long and elaborate swan-song. It is not just that he himself has talked much lately about moving on to films but also that the whole nature of his act can now scarcely support its scale. Like Cincinnati, the centre appears to be failing, the pressure moving more more into subsidiary areas. The music is hard and metallic but curiously passive and for all its brilliant inventiveness Pretty sexless. Clever lyrics and angular arrangements don't make It to the back of a hall like Earl's Court where nearly all the heat came from the audience. Every one of them was on his side and he could so easily have become a rock Garland or Querelle were it not that the last vital connection, the sweat of a real person steaming in the footlights, is missing. With 18,000 people at his feet, his own timidity held him back. The exceptionally beautiful costumes take their share of the blame. They should amplify him. Instead he nearly drowns in them. Maybe this kind of distancing is a practical move in the interests of selfpreservation. It also reveals the schizophrenia in a mind which craves the adoration of an audience, perhaps even annihilation through them, but is too narcissistically uptight to really give of itself. So at times one seemed to be in a bizarre mannequin parade With incidental music of an unusually pungent kind. It is a Parade in which the audience participate, Where else would you see Arsenal supporters wearing drop ear-rings, purple eye-shadow and kohl?
The way Bowie moves, too, is now over-cfroreographed. It is all very well to see him levitate like an albatross or shuffle about in robes like a Noh ,player but too Much predetermination eventually chokes. A lot of his balletic past here when what is actually needed on a crowd this size is the whiplash. To be honest, the most exciting moments in the concert, when the stage began to be a focal point for something more than itself, came when Bowie left it to the three Spiders Who turn out truly manic high-octane rock when they have to. Bowie on paper is now at his Peak. In every other way I think the peak was reached at the time of Ziggy Stardust's release. I saw him then in the comparative intimacy of Oxford Town Hall and he was breathtaking, even though his voice failed half-way through, everything held wincing on a knife edge, and one knew he Would be huge within months. His decline into turnstile statistics became inevitable after that and is Paralleled by the new LP, Aladdin Sane (RCA £2.38) which has already more than justified itself commercially. The musical equations between these two albums are extraordinary with the 4iggy songs always stronger than 9:leir newer Aladdin counterparts. !Nonetheless Aladdin Sane is far from a wash-out, combining great size with nuance and innuendo,
and underlying it an oblique sensation of fear which is present in all Bowie's music. The same goes for the concert, in case I should have given a contrary impression. A vast flock turned up to see a superstar, it was that kind of electrical event, and probably came away with the feeling that they had just seen David Bowie entertain them in the apartments of his imagination. One does not, however, always wish to feel like a guest,
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