FEATURE:
Shining a Light on a New Kate Moss-Hosted Podcast
IN THIS PHOTO: David Bowie in 1975/PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Schapiro
David Bowie: 1970-1975
__________
ALTHOUGH it has been…
IN THIS PHOTO: Two icons: David Bowie and Kate Moss/PHOTO CREDIT: Ellen von Unwerth
nine years since we lost David Bowie, there is still this massive interest. It was a huge shock to learn of his death in January 2016. Almost a decade after that terrible blow, there has been plenty of retrospection and some posthumous released. The archive is still pretty packed I think and I would imagine more albums and songs coming through. Documentaries and David Bowie books. Even though there are few artists around now you can directly link to Bowie, his influence is spreading right through music and so many other industries. In terms of his fashion and reinventions. So many aspects of his career and life. Such a fascinating artist who released seminal albums. With a career spanning fifty years, there are so many amazing eras and periods where he moved between looks, styles and sounds. Every fan will have their own favourite David Bowie album, period or character. In terms of his most important time in music, one could argue it occurred between 1970 and 1975. From 1970’s The Man Who Sold the World to 1975’s Young Americans, there was this evolution and shift. This artist growing in confidence. Aladdin Sane of 1973 was a huge album. 1975 ended a very productive and successful period for David Bowie. In 1976, Bowie released Station to Station and then, in 1977, Low and “Heroes”. It is startling to see how much he grew between 1970 and 1975. How that five-year period enforced his work for the next few years.
I mention this, because there is going to be a new eight-part series broadcast on BBC Radio 6 Music next month (it is available from 10th September). Music Uncovered, David Bowie: Changeling will be fronted and hosted by Kate Moss. She and David Bowie were friends. No doubt, Bowie’s style and fashion genius influenced Kate Moss. Also, his music was hugely important. Part of a series of shows on the station this autumn, I am excited to learn more about David Bowie’s 1970-1975. This is what Rolling Stone UK said in their feature:
“A new podcast series hosted by Kate Moss which explores the life and music of David Bowie is among the new programmes being offered by BBC Radio 6 Music this Autumn.
Music Uncovered, David Bowie: Changeling will see the supermodel, a close friend of Bowie, exploring how the music icon transformed into Ziggy Stardust in the early 1970s and the path he forged to becoming a rock legend.
“David Bowie was a very special person. Someone who was much more than a friend – he was an enigma. So, when the chance came to dive into this extraordinary five-year chapter of Bowie’s life for 6 Music and BBC Sounds, hearing from those who joined him on his creative journey and those he continues to inspire, I was excited to help share the story of such an incredible transformation. This podcast is a real celebration of my friend, a true British icon,” Kate Moss said.
The new eight part podcast will explore Bowie between 1970-75 and features rare and unheard interviews with him, including audio from the BBC Archive and a 2001 chat with Des Shaw, the creator of the podcast.
Other notable names lending their thoughts to the new series include Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan, Boy George, Edward Enninful, Chrissie Hynde, Elton John, Goldie, Robbie Williams and Twiggy. It will also feature archival interviews from the likes of Lady Gaga, the late Sinéad O’Connor and Lou Reed, and Tracey Emin”.
I am going to end this feature with a playlist collating the best tracks and deep cuts from David Bowie’s albums between 1970 and 1975. I want to look at each end of that half-decade. Starting out with this feature from last year that documents and dissects the making of 1970’s The Man Who Sold the World. This was a moment of real growth and creative breakthrough. A moment that set him on course to stardom. I think David Bowie defined music in the 1970s. This album was the first statement from an artist who would soon be seen as an icon and true innovator:
“By March 1970, Major Tom was becoming something of an albatross to his 23-year old earthly counterpart David Bowie. The success of his single Space Oddity, which reached No.5 in the UK and sold nearly 150,000 copies, had pushed up fees for Bowie’s live shows and made him flush for the first time in his six-year career. But the song’s connection to the Apollo Moon landing had coloured it with a novelty status that he was finding it difficult to get past. His latest single, The Prettiest Star, written for his new bride Angie and featuring Marc Bolan on lead guitar, sold only 800 copies and didn’t even make the charts.
Bowie had other troubles on his mind too. He was grieving for his father, who had died a few months earlier at the age of 56. His management contract with Ken Pitt had soured to the point where he wanted out. There was also the delicate matter of his schizophrenic half-brother Terry, who’d been living with his parents. After Bowie’s dad passed away, his mother, unable to cope with Terry, committed him to Cane Hill Asylum. Bowie visited him regularly, but felt increasingly guilty over not being able to do more to help.
Looking back in a 1971 Phonograph interview, Bowie summed up his state of mind at that time: “I really felt so depressed, so aimless, and this torrential feeling of: ‘What’s it all for anyway?’ A lot of it went through that period.”
So it made sense to stay cocooned with Angie in their flat at Haddon Hall, a shambling old Victorian house in Beckenham. Sharing the rent was Bowie’s producer pal Tony Visconti, and his girlfriend. The record that became The Man Who Sold The World began with their late-night conversations about the idea of moving away from singles toward albums.
“We wanted to make an art-rock album,” Visconti said in Dylan Jones’s book David Bowie: A Life. “On the Space Oddity album we had no idea what we were doing. It was all over the map. So we tried something different, something harder. We just threw caution to the wind. It had to be seen by our peers as a work of art rather than just a pop album, as David and I were into the idea of a concept album. The single went out of favour for a while because the likes of Led Zeppelin and Yes were making albums that were outselling singles for the first time We wanted to be seen as a great album group.”
The Man Who Sold The World was released on November 4, 1970 in the US, and April 10 the following year in the UK. Rolling Stone described it “intriguing and chilling”. Phonograph Record praised it for “trying to define some new province of modern music”.
In support of the album, Bowie did a brief tour of US college radio stations, showing up in his Mr. Fish dress, confounding and charming DJs. But since Olav Wyper, his champion at the label, had departed, Mercury did little to promote the record. By early 1971, Tony Defries was already busy engineering Bowie’s move to RCA Victor.
The pushy manager’s increasingly hands-on presence in Bowie’s life ended up forcing Visconti out of the picture and on towards his fruitful partnership with Marc Bolan and T.Rex.
“David was assigning his power to other people,” Visconti said in The Golden Years. “When he meets someone, and he falls in love, forget it. The person’s the one until he’s severely hurt. I said to David: ‘If you go with Tony Defries, I’m not going to go with you.’”
The album enjoyed a brief resurgence in 1974 after Lulu had a UK No.3 hit with her cover of the title track. Produced by Bowie and Mick Ronson, and featuring the Spiders From Mars as a backing band, it veered even further towards the Berlin cabaret feel that was hinted at in the original.
“I didn’t think The Man Who Sold The World was the best song for my voice, but it was such a strong song in itself,” Lulu told author Marc Spitz. “Bowie kept telling me to smoke more cigarettes, to give my voice a certain quality”.
I want to bring in a feature that Dig! published in 2020 that took us inside the making of David Bowie’s Young Americans. That 1975 was another music shift. Not one that thrilled all fans and critics. However, if you look at where he was in 1970 and where he ended in 1975, he had undergone so many changes and was constantly shifting and discovering. Young Americans is one of his most exceptional and underrated albums:
“Young Americans was the first Bowie album to offer a truly startling musical about-face. A shift from the doomy glam of 1974’s Diamond Dogs, it featured his take on the soul and funk music he’d loved as a youth, and then fallen back in love with on that album’s US tour, the final leg of which was variously known as The Soul Tour and The Philly Dogs tour, after the sound Philadelphia International Records had minted on their rise to becoming the Motown of the 70s.
Remarkably, Bowie pulled off his transition from red-haired alien to blue-eyed soul boy. Released on 7 March 1975, Young Americans was a Top 10 hit in the US, and its second single, the irresistible sparse funk of Fame, became his first US No.1. Not only that, but in November 1975 Bowie received the ultimate nod of approval when he was invited to be one of the first white artists to perform on the hugely influential US TV show Soul Train. The success of Young Americans gave him the artistic freedom to follow his muse wherever it took him.
“Young Americans, the album Fame is from, is, I would say, the definitive plastic soul record,” Bowie told Playboy in 1976. “It’s the squashed remains of ethnic music as it survives in the age of Muzak rock, written and sung by a white limey.” Despite what he said after the fact, Bowie went out of his way to make his take on R&B and soul as authentic as possible.
While on the first leg of his Diamond Dogs tour, Bowie connected with the soul music ruling the US airwaves at the time, reawakening a deep musical love and providing inspiration for his next move. Over the course of the first leg of the tour (captured on the 1974 album David Live, which had been recorded from 10 to 13 July 1974 at the Tower Theater, Pennsylvania), Bowie began rearranging his own songs and covering classic soul tracks like Eddie Floyd’s Stax hit Knock On Wood, to reflect his new musical crush. When it came to demoing material for his new studio album, he was keen to go to the source of the “Philly sound” – Sigma Studios’ house band, MFSB, a loose group of more than 30 crack studio musicians who’d backed The O’Jays, Harold Melvin And The Blue Notes and The Spinners, while finding huge success of their own with 1973’s Love Is The Message”.
IN THIS PHOTO: David Bowie is seen with a large barking dog while working on the artwork for his album, Diamond Dogs, in London in 1974/PHOTO CREDIT: Terry O'Neill/Getty Images
I will end with this feature from TIME. It was excerpted from TIME’s David Bowie: His Life on Earth, an eighty-page, fully illustrated commemorative edition. Available at retailers and at Amazon.com. It is clear that the first half of the 1970s was a hugely important period for David Bowie. It will be interesting to hear the eight-part BBC Radio 6 Music series about this period. How David Bowie’s 1970-1975 was this fascinating time. One that not only changed his career but the music landscape around him:
“Call him clairvoyant: Way back in the 1970s, David Bowie envisioned key parts of our culture today. During the most crucial decade in Bowie’s career, his forward-thinking approach to sexual identity, celebrity image and musical presentation tipped off many of the hot-button issues that currently obsess us. Think about it: the way social media allows us to create alternate selves at will, the manner in which society increasingly views gender as fluid, as well as the theatrical identities of modern stars from Daft Punk to the hip-hop collective Odd Future all have seeds in Bowie’s quick-change run of characters in the ’70s. Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke and the Man Who Fell to Earth, taken together, made a statement that rejected the very notion of a fixed self. At the same time, they gave rock a wholly new theatrical flourish.
Just as prime-time Bowie tried on and discarded characters as blithely as one would clothes, so he ran mad through a dizzying range of musical styles. He made innovations in art pop, glam rock, German industrial music and more, along the way minting a dense discography of classics. During that pivotal decade, he didn’t release a single less than defining work, creating a dozen successive touchstones.
While Bowie’s lithe figure and pretty face gave him an androgynous aura from the start, he didn’t use that role in so focused, and shocking, a way until the U.K. cover of his 1970 album The Man Who Sold the World. It found him draped over a chaise longue wearing a dress and sporting long tresses that seemed less like the hippie casual norm of the day than like something out of old Hollywood. When he appeared in a similar fashion for an interview with Rolling Stone, its writer described him as “ravishing” and “almost disconcertingly reminiscent of Lauren Bacall.” Even so, Bowie’s U.S. label of the era, RCA, reissued the album in a less provocative cover, depicting Bowie in a more common rockstar pose: a macho kick. The music inside led Bowie in a harder-rocking direction than its folk and pop-leaning predecessors. The title track proved enduring enough to inspire an aching cover version by Nirvana on their 1994 concert album, MTV Unplugged in New York.
It was Bowie’s next work, Hunky Dory, that kicked off his classic run. On one level, that 1971 album seemed to boldface the star’s influences, with one track titled “Song for Bob Dylan” and another “Andy Warhol.” A third cut, “Queen Bitch,” nodded to the decadent rock flash of the Velvet Underground. At the same time, Bowie transformed those references into a sound very much his own, marked by high-drama vocals and a deep melodic command. “Life on Mars?” had such a theatrical flair, it later provided a suitable cover for Barbra Streisand. Bowie advertised his ability to move swiftly between all these styles with the album’s opening proclamation, “Changes,” a song that doubled as a mantra.
To that end, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars found him performing in an entirely new guise, as the title character backed by his raging Spiders rock band. “Offstage, I’m a robot; onstage, I achieve emotion,” Bowie said back then of his love of assuming characters. “It’s probably why I prefer dressing up as Ziggy to being David.”
Bowie could have tarried longer on the glam-rock bandwagon he had helped create, but he changed yet again on 1975’s Young Americans. Enlisting a talented but then little known singer, Luther Vandross, who co-wrote a track and helped with arrangements, Bowie offered what he called “plastic soul,” a cheeky label for his co-opting of African-American R&B and funk, heard in hits like the title track and the No. 1 dance standard “Fame.”
Bowie’s description of the music may have advertised its inauthenticity, but that only enhanced his consistent outsider stance”.
The interview archives and unheard audio will be a treat for David Bowie fans. It will provide new context and insight into David Bowie and his 1970s. Contributions from Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan, Boy George, Edward Enninful, Chrissie Hynde, Elton John, Goldie, Robbie Williams and Twiggy. Those sharing their memories and reasons why David Bowie is so important. His 1970-1975 saw this shift from him becoming this properly established artist at the start of the decade, to this icon by the mid-1970s. Hearing Kate Moss talk about David Bowie and fronting this incredible podcast series. It goes to show that David Bowie is still enormously relevant today. So much to explore and discuss. His legacy and brilliance will…
BURN bright forever.