![]() You don’t pore over Bowie’s lyrics in search of a system, or decode them like a squinting Dylanologist. “The words just jolly it along.” Which is at once a piece of jocular English understatement and a moment of coolly reckoned artistic clarity. “In the chords and melodies is everything I want to say,” Bowie once declared. By your touch (and yours, and yours) he is obliterated. His most wildly compassionate lyric, the nakedest act of emotional outreach in his entire songbook, and it’s not even him singing it-it’s Ziggy Stardust, his interstellar blow job of a fabricated rock star, for whom the longed-for moment of connection will be, unfortunately, terminal. Gimme your hands / ’Cause you’re wonderful! Gimme your hands! screams Ziggy at the edge of the stage, projecting himself into a black hole of adoration. It’s the last number on his 1972 rock opera, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, and the song at the conclusion of which-according to Bowie’s messianic conception of the character of Ziggy Stardust, a guitar-wielding idol descended from the firmament-the singer is torn to pieces by his fans, or aliens, or both. “Rock’n’Roll Suicide” is his theatrical muse at maximum inflation-a showstopper, literally. Or maybe four or five of the most potent lyricists, because in his decentered, repeatedly selving way he commanded a variety of modes and manners. Oh no, love, you’re not alone … All the knives seem to lacerate your brain / I’ve had my share, I’ll help you with the pain / You’re not alone!ĭavid Bowie, we now realize, with his words chiming posthumously in our heads, was one of the most potent lyricists in rock history. And then he said, ‘What more could any man ask for?’ At the time, I thought, ‘What an odd thing to say?’ It was only after that I realised he was signing off.I n the dark days of January, as the news of David Bowie’s death gusted bleakly across the info-seas and all the boats trembled, a number of people I know found themselves murmuring, or singing in their brains, the lyrics to “Rock’n’Roll Suicide.” Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth … Why this song, at that moment? Because it’s a song about not being isolated by suffering, a soul-spanning song that begins minutely, with a single person in fidgety, mentally distressed close-up- You pull on your finger / Then another finger / Then cigarette-and amplifies unstoppably toward a salvific, histrionic, orchestra-of-the-nervous-system climax. He said that he was very happy with the album and with his lot in life. He was sending out lots of emails - including one to me. “He was working very hard, putting his house in order. “Everyone told me that he mentioned it, and just moved off the subject,” said Whately. Bowie found out he was dying while onset. Compiling interviews with the collaborators the singer worked with on his final two albums and 2015 off-Broadway musical Lazarus, Whately delved into the intention of his last works, and how his cancer diagnosis in 2014 affected that work.Īlthough Bowie underwent chemotherapy, treatment was stopped in November 2015 while he filmed the video for the Blackstar track Lazarus. ![]() It’s one of the titbits of Bowie’s reclusive last years that Whately uncovered in the film. “Apparently, she’s a yoga teacher in Bristol now.” “After all those years, who would have thought he was still thinking about her?” said Whately. While working on the 1970 film Song Of Norway, Farthingale left Bowie for another actor on set. “She was his first big love,” documentary director Francis Whately told The Post. ![]()
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