At 11pm on the 7th January 2013, just before going to bed, I logged into David Bowie’s official website. The following day would be his 66th birthday and maybe – just maybe – something would be happening. The screen came up. ‘Website down for routine maintenance’. Ah well. Goodnight.
I wasn’t particularly surprised. Little had been heard from Bowie since his heart attack in 2004. In 2005 he gave what would be his only extended post heart attack interview. The interviewer was Courtney Pine and we learned that a slightly frail sounding Bowie was doing fine, taking a year off and starting to working on a new album. Sounded promising.
2006 saw Bowie back on stage for the first time since the heart attack, singing two songs with David Gilmour in May and duetting with Alicia Keys in November. He also had cameo roles as Nicolai Tesla in Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed film The Prestige (which earned Bowie some of the best acting reviews of his career) and as himself in Ricky Gervais’s Extras. Then came the news that Bowie would be curating the 2007 Highline Festival in New York and that the festival would include a full come-back concert by Bowie himself. Exciting.
The festival happened but Bowie’s own gig was cancelled at short notice on the grounds that he was working on ‘other projects’. This was disappointing, unconvincing and a bit ominous. After this, the mood music changed. No more talk of years off. Just silence very occasionally broken by very small pieces of work. There were whole years when we heard nothing from him. It increasingly looked like he’d retired.
In April 2011 – although none of us new this at the time – Bowie returned to the studio to record a new album. He’d come up with the idea of recording an album gradually but also of recording it in complete secrecy and just suddenly releasing it without any fanfare. This required quite a complex operation involving the musicians, the staff at the recording studio and some and some others but – despite a couple of minor breaches – they pulled it off.
When the album – entitled The Next Day – was finished, he brought it to his record company who were delighted (they’d also known nothing about it) but puzzled by one thing, ‘Where’s the marketing strategy?’ Bowie was asked. ‘There isn’t one.’ Bowie replied. ‘We are simply going to put it online at midnight and see what happens’. Quite a lot happened.
On the morning of the 8th January 2013, I am drinking my coffee and I log onto Paul Kinder’s excellent Bowiewonderworld website. There is an excited thread about a new album. This can’t be right . . but . . . maybe . . . so I go to Bowie’s own site and there it is. The new single Where are we Now, its excellent video and the release date for the new album. If I’d stayed up another hour . . .
In mid 2014, Bowie was diagnosed with cancer. He went into remission in early 2015 and was in remission while writing and recording Blackstar. When Visconti put it to Bowie that he was writing his farewell album, Bowie just laughed.
Blackstar broke new ground for Bowie – a rock album recorded by jazz musicians – and some of its songs and videos are amongst the best of his career. He’d also completed a musical – Lazarus – another first. It was an exciting time and, for a short while, it felt like the old days. Then – suddenly – he was gone and the album revealed its true meaning. ‘Look up here, I’m in Heaven’.
David Power’s Blackstar transcriptions will be performed by the Delta Saxophone Quartet on Saturday 4th July at 7.30pm..
Further details and tickets: Late Music Concerts