Hallo Spaceboy by Dave Thompson

Author:Dave Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO005000, MUS035000, BIO004000
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2006-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Business Cesspools Hating Through our Sleeves

1998 saw Bowie making headlines for reasons far removed from his musical, acting or even artistic endeavors, as a succession of magazine polls placed him among the richest musicians in the world, with an estimated worth of $900 million. It was a colossal sum, all the more so since, twenty years earlier, Bowie had publicly announced that he was “broke,” in the wake of his parting from Tony DeFries and MainMan.

He may well have been. It was not a cheap divorce. Besides, the bulk of Bowie’s income did derive from the years since then. Let’s Dance alone outsold the bulk of his “classic” seventies albums several times over, while the deals he signed with EMI America in 1983 and Savage a decade later had generated a sizeable chunk of change in their own right. To that, one can then add three astonishingly lucrative tours (damn the critics, Serious Moonlight, Glass Spider and Sound + Vision all did brisk business at the box office) and, to that, add back catalog sales, both over the counter to fans updating their vinyl collections, and to fans new and old en masse. In 1997, EMI (again) paid out $28.5 million for the rights to Bowie’s entire 1969–1993 catalog.

Now Bowie was looking to double that sum, as he contacted financier David Pullman to orchestrate what would become known as the Bowie Bonds scheme, a deal in which Bowie received a lump sum of $55 million, advanced against the future sales of that back catalog, a sum he intended using to buy MainMan out of his life.

In 1971, when Bowie had first contracted with DeFries, he had put his name to a ten-year deal that split the profits equally, fifty-fifty, between artist and management. Four years later, the terms of their severance retained that split for the music Bowie recorded prior to 1975, then reduced DeFries’ share to sixteen percent for the remainder of the original contract’s lifespan.

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