Bowie on Bowie by Sean Egan

Author:Sean Egan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2015-01-24T16:00:00+00:00

PART TWO: ALIAS SMITHS AND JONES

“There’s quite a bit of you in this one …” Brett is at the tape deck, his back to us, about to play a rough mix of an as-yet-untitled track from the forthcoming Suede LP. Bowie puts his hand to his mouth, checks that Brett can’t see him, and sniggers.

The track plays. Bowie closes his eyes and mock-swoons at the voluptuous chorus. He compliments Brett on his vocals and lyrics. “That’s brilliant,” he says. “The poignancy of the everyday is very apparent in your work.”

Brett smiles: “Well, I’m bogged down by the everyday, so it feels like I should write about it.”

“And here they come, the boys from Suede, dignifying the lot of the working man …” Bowie has adopted the plummy accent of a Second World War newscaster. “In their long shorts, with their shovels on their shoulders, they’re ready to dig the trenches for the good of the English folk. Hooray, we say. Hip hip hooray.”

“I always aim to take a small statement and make it elegant,” laughs Brett. “The point is to actually speak to other people. I never actually do things for myself at all. Thoughts are essentially quite useless for me unless they’re broadcast in an acceptable way.

“That’s the great thing about Morrissey—loads of people have thought those thoughts before, his thoughts weren’t particularly groundbreaking in any way, but the fact that he actually managed, for the first time, to express them to the general populous instead of being an elitist philosopher or just a writer that spoke to a few people, the fact that he actually managed to put those thoughts within an easily palatable art form; that’s what was great about him.”

Bowie: “And he did it asexually. So many of Morrissey’s songs are very asexual. There’s not a sexual bait to them, even if he talks about sexual situations. I think people are quite happy to take their grey anguish from a band like the Velvets or, at the moment, Nirvana, because it’s got great dollops of sex attached to it. But he neutered it to an extent and that seemed kind of unfair or something. I think that maybe produces a lot of hostility toward him.”

Brett: “Were you into The Smiths, then?”

Bowie: “I thought they were good, yeah. I got to like The Smiths more and more as it went on. I wasn’t an immediate fan. I must say that I was disturbed to find out that the Pixies had broken up. That was the band that I thought was gonna happen in a big way, and I was a bit miffed when Nirvana came along using the same musical dynamics; y’know, keeping it way down for a verse and then suddenly bursting out with the volume on the chorus. And, of course, Charles was far better lyrically. His lyrics were fabulous. It feels like so many of the bands now are Johnny-Come-Latelys. There’s a huge bandwagon. It’s opened the gates to mediocrity.”

Brett: “But anything good does, doesn’t it?” SS: I guess there’s a whole generation of little Suedes on their way as we speak.

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