David Bowie by Dylan Jones

Author:Dylan Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2017-09-12T04:00:00+00:00

8

PUT ON YOUR RED SHOES AND DANCE THE BLUES

1980–1985

DAVID MALLET (VIDEO DIRECTOR): I first met David when I was producing and directing The Kenny Everett Show, and we had him on the show performing a rehash of “Space Oddity.” This must have been January 1980. He liked what I did for him and asked if I would make some videos. He was completely un-strange, highly intelligent…I think I would actually say that the biggest plus point was that he just wanted to collaborate. It started off as, I guess you could say, mutual suspicion. Rock and rollers aren’t mad on television people, and television people are normally slightly in awe of, or, expecting the worst from, someone with his reputation. But everything I found was completely the opposite to what I would have expected. I probably learnt from him a lot of stagecraft and showmanship tricks, particularly stagecraft because he’d obviously learned from people like Lindsay Kemp. If he said, “Blah, blah, blah” and I said, “Oh bollocks, that won’t work,” he’d say, “Oh, all right then” and we’d come up with something else. We talked about old television a lot, ridiculous things, obscure British nostalgia. We had a little obsession with an English harp player called Shirley Abicair who was always on TV in the ’50s. God knows what she was, just a ridiculous name that we both remembered from our childhood. Stupid things like that. In those days, video was regarded as the top form as opposed to a bit of wallpaper, which it is now, so you did your very best to make a film based on the record that was either to a lesser or greater extent illustrative of the song. On “Ashes to Ashes,” David said he wanted to be a clown on a beach with a bonfire and wanted to include all the New Romantics, all these characters from the Blitz club. I said great, but I can improve on that, because I’d recently done something where I found a process which made the sky turn black and it made the whole thing look like some hallucinogenic dream. Great, says David, we’ll do that. The norm for a video in those days was a day, but “Ashes to Ashes” broke the record at three. There was a beach, there was a studio, there was a building site, you know, on and on. It was epic.

The filming was interrupted at one point by an old man walking his dog, looking for driftwood. Mallet asked him if he wouldn’t mind moving, and pointed out Bowie sitting outside the catering van. “Do you know who this is?” he asked. Sharp as a tack, the old man responded with, “Of course I do. It’s some cunt in a clown suit.” Sometime later, Bowie remembered, “That was a huge moment for me. It put me back in my place and made me realize, ‘Yes, I’m just a cunt in a clown suit.’ ”

IAIN R. WEBB: In 1980, when Bowie planned

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