On Bowie by Simon Critchley

Author:Simon Critchley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books

The evocation of love turns on the elevation of the moment, the kiss in the rain, like the kiss at the Berlin Wall, which is then immediately followed by a desperate plea, “Get me to the doctor.”

In “5:15 The Angels Have Gone”, from Heathen, Bowie once again uses the metaphor of travel to dramatise the scene of departure after the failure of love. The genuinely searing, polyphonic chorus of this torch song is “We never talk anymore, Forever I will adore you.” This is a more elegiac experience of love, dominated by the reality of absence, of a past that is unrepeatable and utterly gone. Never more.

This is also the core of “Where Are We Now?”, which is perhaps a eulogy to Bowie’s loyal assistant in the 1970s and sometime lover Corinne “Coco” Schwab. But love finds a concrete focus in relation to a specific place and time: Berlin in the late 1970s. I am sure that there was some yearning on Bowie’s part to be twenty-nine again and move to Berlin with Iggy, to go to endless tranny clubs, puff on cigarettes, drink constantly and record music all night. It sounds great. But this isn’t any simple wallowing in the past. It is an engagement with the memories that often flay us alive as a way of raising the question: where, indeed, are we now?

The closest we get to sheer nostalgia is in Bowie’s evocations of England and especially the London of his childhood and youth in the 1950s. “Absolute Beginners” from 1986, named after Colin MacInnes’ 1959 novel, deals directly with this period and is arguably Bowie’s best moment in the second half of the 1980s. Again, it is a love song:

But if my love is your love

We’re certain to succeed.

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