FEATURE:
Second Spin
David Bowie - Heathen
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HIS twenty-third studio album…
nodded back to his sound and work during the 1970s. David Bowie’s Heathen was released on 10th June, 2002. Ahead of its twentieth anniversary, I anted to revisit an album that remains quite underrated. I think Bowie’s career was quite mixed in the 1990s and early-2000s. 1995’s Outside, 1997’s Earthling and 1999’s Hours have their moments – though they are weaker compared to Bowie’s classic albums of the 1970s and the stronger material he put out from the mid-2000s until his death in 2016. Bowie supported the album on the Heathen Tour throughout mid-2002, where he performed at several festivals. The album marked a creative and commercial resurgence for Bowie following a period of experimentation in the 1990s. A finer album that many gave it credit for in 2002, Heathen was then followed by 2003’s Reality. It would be a decade until Bowie put out The Next Day. It is interesting looking at Davie Bowie’s career and how he put out this amazing run in the 1970s; a quieter and less successful 1980s and 1990s, before he strengthened again in the 2000s and 2010s. Heathen is worth of another spin. With an extensive promotional campaign, there was a lot of interest and anticipation around the album in 2002. There have been some mixed reviews and criticism around Heathen. Maybe people felt it was quite a dark album and they were expecting something different. In retrospect, Heathen is seen as a commercial resurgence for Bowie.
An important album that announced a return and new stage of his career, I think Heathen contains some classics. I will come to a couple of positive reviews for Heathen. Rather than this being an album, as some said, that was disappointing and had its weak spots, Heathen is Bowie reinspired and reinvigorated. Dig! wrote a fascinating dissection of Heathen. They noted how this was a David Bowie where he was fully-formed and in prime form:
“There had definitely been a shifting of priorities in the period leading up to Heathen’s release. In August 2000, Bowie had become a father for the second time, and caring for his infant daughter became his main focus in the early part of the 2000s. He’d also spent some time looking back at his career while working on Toy, a collection of re-recordings of some of his earliest material with producer Tony Visconti, his right-hand man during his 70s purple patch.
The album never saw the light of day, but the sessions rekindled Bowie and Visconti’s working relationship while also giving rise to three new songs – Slip Away (then called Uncle Floyd), Afraid and Your Turn To Drive, providing the creative spark for Heathen.
Bowie clearly relished working with his old producer, as he revealed in a BowieNet webchat on 16 August 2000, ahead of the Heathen sessions: “What Tony and I always found to be one of our major strengths is the ability to free each other up from getting into a rut. So no doubt there will be some huge challenges, but also some pretty joyous occasions. In short, really looking forward to this.”
“I WAS LITERALLY CRYING WHEN I WAS WRITING”
After demo sessions held across Visconti’s home studio and Looking Glass Studios in Manhattan, New York City, in the summer of 2001, Bowie and Visconti were ready to begin Heathen in earnest. Following a recommendation from guitarist David Torn (Madonna , kd Lang, Tori Amos), the pair settled on Allaire Studios, a new complex nestled among the mountains of upstate New York.
The beauty and remoteness of the location made a big impression on Bowie, as he told Interview magazine in June 2002. “It’s stark, and it has a Spartan quality about it. In this instance, the retreat atmosphere honed my thoughts… I don’t know what happened up there, but something clicked for me as a writer. I’ve written in the mountains before, but never with such gravitas.” He elaborated on this with The Daily Beast, revealing, “I’m in there working at six in the morning, just playing the synthesiser, the piano, and working on what we’re going to do that day – and I’m looking out at the deer and I don’t believe this is happening to me, the serenity and the majesty of it. How beautiful the world is… I reflected with such intensity and it came over me like a wave. It really did. Some mornings I was literally crying when I was writing a song.”
“WE HAD A GREAT DAY, A MUCH-NEEDED DAY”
A routine emerged, with Visconti and drummer Matt Chamberlain (Bob Dylan, Fiona Apple, Randy Newman) joining Bowie in the studio mid-morning to work on the material. They recorded 19 backing tracks in two weeks, before additional musicians were drafted in to flesh out the songs, among them David Torn, Dream Theater keyboardist Jordan Rudess and The Scorchio Quartet.
Towards the end of the Allaire sessions, however, the events of 9/11 shocked the world and Heathen went on hold. Writing on his blog, Visconti reflected on how returning to work became a healing process for all involved: “After a few days we called for The Scorchio Quartet to see if they felt like recording. We had very little left to do. Of course, it was the best thing to do, to try doing something to make life seem normal again. They braved all the checkpoints out of the city, crammed into violist Martha Mooke’s car and arrived a little shaken but anxious to make music.”
Visconti had already written scores for the orchestra, and he and Bowie asked the string players to play through guitar amps. “It all worked so well,” Visconti recalled. “We had a great day, a much-needed day.” By 15 September, everyone “packed up and went back to our respective homes, to take a break” before reconvening at Looking Glass Studios for overdubs, where another old 70s cohort, Earl Slick – who had appeared on the Young Americans and Station To Station albums – recorded parts for Everyone Says ‘Hi’. More guest turns came from Dave Grohl (helping to turn Neil Young’s I’ve Been Waiting For You into a doomy glam stomper) and Pete Townshend (delivering a coruscating solo on Slow Burn).
“I’VE USED A THEMATIC DEVICE SINCE THE 60S”
The end result was one of Bowie’s most rewarding late-period albums. The stark beauty of Allaire informed both the slow-moving, Scott Walker-like opener, Sunday, and the majestic closing track, Heathen (The Rays), but – perhaps inevitably – the album’s lyrics were taken by many to be about 9/11. Bowie later refuted this, claiming they’d been written before the terrorist attacks; though he admitted they seemed uncannily prescient in the aftermath, he pointed out that much of Heathen dealt with subject matter he’d been wrestling with his entire career. “I always write about the same things. I just approach them differently each time, I think,” he told Interview.
“The subject matter is… I’ve got a thematic device, really, that I’ve used ever since the 60s, which is basically the isolation of the human and how he stands in relationship to his universe, and how he struggles to find some connection with that,” Bowie continued. This is borne out on the grandiose gloom of Slip Away, Slow Burn, I Would Be Your Slave and 5:15 The Angels Have Gone.
“I’M ON TOP OF MY GAME AT THE MOMENT”
There were also signs that fatherhood had impacted on his writing – not least on one of Heathen’s stand-outs, the breezy motorik-pop of A Better Future, on which he petitions a nameless higher power for a world without “pain and sorrow”, asking for “sunny smiles” for his children. His way with a cover version hadn’t deserted him, either. Heathen finds Bowie enjoying himself on a suitably spiky version of Pixies’ Cactus while giving The Legendary Stardust Cowboy’s I Took A Trip On A Gemini Spaceship the souped-up Earthling treatment.
Confirming that Bowie was on great form, Heathen reached No.5 in the UK and No.14 in the US, earned a Mercury Music Prize nomination and launched a successful world tour. “All you can do as an artist is do what you can at the time that you’re doing it,” he told Interview. “With Heathen I just feel… I’m pretty much on top of my game at the moment. I think the work that I’m writing at the moment is exceptionally good, and I’m hoping that I’m going to continue like this, in which case I’m going to have an exciting future”.
Before ending, it is worth comparing critical reviews. I am not going to drop in the average or negative ones. The Guardian provided a positive assessment and some real depth when it came to David Bowie’s 2002 gem:
“The one thing Bowie has consistently failed to do in recent years - and what he apparently did so effortlessly throughout the 1970s - is contain his outre leanings within a crowd-pleasing pop framework. Which is where Heathen, his 27th studio album, comes in. Heathen achieves a balance noticeably lacking in Bowie's output of the past 20 years. At one extreme, it boasts a perplexing "concept" (apparently it involves "One who does not see his world. He has no mental light. He destroys almost unwittingly. He cannot feel any of God's presence in his life. He is the 21st-century man" - that's that cleared up, then), and lyrics that defy explication: "Don't forget to keep your head on, twinkle twinkle Uncle Floyd," runs the chorus of Slip Away. At the other, it features Everybody Says Hi, a lovely song on which Bowie contemplates his son Joe's adulthood in the most prosaic terms imaginable: "I'd like to get a letter, like to know what's what, hope the weather's good and it's not too hot."
Bowie and co-producer Tony Visconti have come up with a string of fascinating arrangements. The title track surges erratically. Pete Townshend contributes noisy scattershot guitar to Slow Burn. I Would Be Your Slave features a string section hovering unsettlingly above a metronomic drum pattern and electronic pulses. Yet the settings never overshadow the songs: strident, confident, lush with melodies. A Better Future is insanely hummable, I Would Be Your Slave romantic and weird in equal measure. If the cover of the Pixies' Cactus tries too hard to capture the spooked intensity of the original, his version of Neil Young's I've Been Waiting for You is subjected to perfect Bowie-isation, the earthiness of the original replaced by other- worldly alienation.
It would be wrong to herald Heathen as a complete return to 1970s form. It lacks the thrilling sense of artistic tumult that marks Station to Station, Low or 1980's Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), albums on which ideas appear to burst forth, barely marshalled. But those were records made by a decadent gay saxophone-playing cokehead alien pierrot with an interest in fascism and the oc cult. Heathen is the work of a multi-millionaire 55-year-old father of two.
Packed with fantastic songs, liberally sprinkled with intriguing touches, Heathen is the sound of a man who has finally worked out how to grow old with a fitting degree of style. When you consider the state of his peers, that is a unique achievement in itself. It is also a more exciting and adventurous record than anything produced by the bands he has chosen for Meltdown, most of whom are half his age. A backhanded compliment maybe, but a compliment none the less”.
Pitchfork also provided their views on an album that seemed like a reignition and creative rebirth for David Bowie. Twenty years after its release, it remains a little under-explored and undervalued to me:
“This is not a particularly cheery record: "Sunday" is a somber, almost sinister chant that builds into an ascending chorus of warm synths and percussion-- a tense, minimal remix of the best moments of Earthling, if you will. In what will surely be the song most often quoted by record critics, "Slip Away," Bowie muses: "Some of us will always stay behind/ Down in space it's always 1982/ The joke we always knew," a brief moment of smiling recognition at the state of his career, fans, and detractors in the wake of his past glory days. Gorgeous and sad, it evokes the simplicity of the past as Bowie sings of "sailing over Coney Island" to a lone piano melody and a compelling Moog-y electronic refrain.
"Slow Burn" is the strongest of Bowie's original material on Heathen-- a moody, bouncy piece with a bass/sax combo that vaguely elicits a 60s pop undercurrent with guitar work from Pete Townshend (yeah, that Pete Townshend!). Townshend's help here is appreciated, mostly because it means the guitar isn't being played by Reeves Gabrels. If Bowie had considered bringing him in earlier, he could have avoided the horror of a car crash like Hours' "The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell." Fortunately, Townshend's guitar noodling never steps into the realm of being entirely gratuitous, and as with all the best songs on Heathen, Bowie's vocals are wisely left to dominate.
But oddly, it's the covers that are truly the highlight of the album. Bowie tries his hand at the Pixies' "Cactus" (a move which might make the album's title sound ironically appropriate)-- but take a deep breath. Everything's going to be okay. Mercifully, he handles the song very faithfully, and actually does it justice. He's a far cry from Black Francis, but Bowie's voice is so amazingly distinctive that it almost sounds like a different song. He then moves on to Neil Young's "I've Been Waiting for You." I don't know what's caused the current rash of Neil Young covers lately, but at least Bowie's old enough to make this sound a little more natural than most might..
Heathen's piece de resistance, though, is the phenomenal cover of "I Took a Trip In a Gemini Spaceship" by The Legendary Stardust Cowboy. Name-based alter ego issues aside, this song is smooth. It's got a fast-paced electronic rhythm to quicken the pulse, and dulcet tones to soothe the ear-- nothing but laid-back electropop fun from start to finish. It's the kind of thing they'll be playing in the lounge of the International Space Station in about ten years or so, assuming the capsule doesn't get pimped out as an orbiting bachelor pad for N*SYNC or something stupid like that.
Bowie is obviously never going to recapture his trend-setting finesse of yesteryear, but at least he seems okay with that. And that's this record's greatest strength. Back when he was busy reminding everyone how out of it he really was by touring with Trent Reznor, he started to play "The Man Who Sold the World" and I actually heard a kid, maybe only two years younger than me, say, "Oh, cool. He's covering a Nirvana song." If that's not a warning sign, I don't know what is. Yes, David, the music world is moving on without you, but you can't end things with Heathen-- some of us, myself included, are still waiting for that final blaze of glory. Before you go, you've got to let the kids know what they missed out on”.
On 10th June, there will be new pieces written about David Bowie’s twenty-third studio album. Heathen is not up there with its very best, but it was not quite given as much respect as it deserved. In 2002, there wasn’t a huge expectation that he would produce anything a lot stronger than his 1990s albums. Heathen definitely reversed Bowie’s commercial fortunes and started a new…
GOLDEN run of albums.