David Bowie 1990 Interview

don't ask me that question i cannot believe you asked me that question no why not do you believe you actually asked me that question well it was in the air wasn't it it has been in the air for 20 years i'm sorry i'm sorry is this the real david bowie sounds like a steve martin question um i said it's as near as you're going to get i mean yeah in 1971 you sang look at your rock and rollers soon now you're gonna get older was it that bad after all getting older not at all no no no it's good people are written books about you they've written articles psychologists have analyzed you called you schizophrenic a person seeking for his identity the sociologists have called your phenomenon how do you look upon yourself being just a case for other people i look israelis often i don't think it's something that really plays much part but do you read it no no you don't think about it at all no now that you've just brought it up i'll have to think about it then but do you have some sort of conscious relation to the fact that you have enormous power being an idol don't have power being like people do when you tell them to dance they dance no they people have their own willpower they do what they do you don't feel some sort of pressure that none at all that people do the same things as you do no not at all what a strange question no do you think so as an idol people look up to you i think i'm seen as an idol i think i'm seen as a more than confident songwriter who's a good performer i think idol is rather kind of a 50s concept i don't really think you know applies to people like me not i don't think so i think we're often regarded as old friends by people who have been listening to our work for some time [Music] i think maybe in the shallow form of idol that you mean possibly the new bands like new kids on the block and that area there's an idle kind of situation but not for an artist my age no not at all it wasn't anything a rocular about what i was doing i was never an oracle for the times i dealt with characters and i portrayed their lives and their feelings i mean that five years for instance applies to ziggy stardust but most particularly just to him and his little world um i don't think i've ever been involved in a kind of a song which says the world is going to die says david bowie no i think ziggy stardust knew that his world was dying but that's a very different thing that's playing with theater rock how did you the idea of making such figures come up well twofold one was the fact that i didn't particularly feel comfortable performing as a straight ahead singer on stage and my interest had always been in one of a better word multimedia type situations i like the idea of combining theater and music and um the whole atmosphere and creating an atmosphere for stage i thought was terribly important it was to me anyway it's what i wanted to do so it then became necessary to devise characters to sing the songs of these little stories that i was writing so it was really uh very much the first three or four albums that came out of that period were um theatrical undertakings with music but then i started quite like singing them on my own so i had to get rid of them so when the psychologists say that oh it's a person seeking for his own personal reality a person seeking for his own person why did you decide stop making them the characters yeah last one i think was probably 1976 i think it was with a thin white joke and since then it's been very much a question of i think all the tours since then have just been me they might have been pretty jazzy looking some of them but they weren't done as character i don't know what a superstar is the only thing that i have any notion of is the fact that i can usually get a good table in restaurants that's all it's worth to be a good writer and a good performer takes i think obviously a certain ability to communicate ideas and then probably a lot of work i guess i guess but that's just being an artist you know which is a more important thing than being a superstar communication what does the word mean to you to be able to be to be excited by a series of ideas and then to translate and re-communicate that excitement to other people the famous piece with bing crosby i knew yeah how did that come about absolutely no idea i mean it was the the strangest uh combination i the idea i thought was so quirky that it was worth doing i mean it's you know i couldn't do that anymore because he's dead of course so i was kind of lacking but um i thought it was an extraordinary situation to be in and i knew that nobody else would probably do that kind of thing no why not they don't do that if we buy that there is an opposition between what you call the intellectual brain and the emotional heart which one of these have been the driving force in your career well as i have a bicameral brain uh i'm ruled by both the left and right at different times in my life so i think everything that i've written comes generally from the heart the process of putting it together is often one of uh more of a cerebral effort i think i often play around with different concepts and ways of putting songs together or putting shows together but the initial thrust of anything that i do comes from a need to do so i think both take their importance in work critics have claimed that you are ideal okay then we'll just skip it but no you can ask me the question but have the question come from you uh not some critic okay well well i'm just interested in in style yeah if style is just as important as the content if by style you mean uh i mean it's interesting if some songs are talking only about style then uh that has a certain kind of validity it depends what aspect of one's work you're interested in projecting i think i've almost run the full gamut from things that are fairly heartfelt through to pieces that specifically deal with artifice um i don't think it's either one thing or the other i think the only thing that's recognizable in my work is generally a form of writing i mean i think pretty much you can always recognize one of my songs as being one of my songs but they tend to have a great variety because i'm very open to expressing myself in very very different ways as the mood takes me but not as as an audience or some a person in an audience yeah i look upon you as a bit more balanced maybe than you were 20 years ago of course yes and the world can't we all say that about ourselves well hopefully not you when you're not old enough no when i get old when you get older you'll be able to say that and the world is a bit more balanced too and do you think that i think the world is in flux no balance is is um a bit more i'm not saying it's very balanced but i think there's a great positivism uh internationally but unfortunately as with all of life it's uh you can never depend on more than one day's worth of anything you just don't know the reverberations which way they'll carry for from any coins i've been married five times in the last two years twice in california once in switzerland i think twice a mystique and eric clapton and tina turner mick and jerry all flew in for it um how do these things happen can somebody give me a sensible answer i'm sorry it's not going to be my last last hope but i'm afraid that it probably will be the last time that i'll be doing these songs i think after i've done these 25 30 songs whatever we decide to do um i won't be doing them ever again david i very much want to continue working the way that i'm working and keep myself excited there's no point in just continually doing uh songs on a and reflecting on a past david david david lady david who have admitted on their latest tour that they're cashing in on their old material is this how you see it with the 1990 tour they're not in tin machine are they um uh no um i'm cashing in on my songs you kidding me they're great songs i'm a very good performer do you plan it do you plan to tour of tim's show i feel about that there's about 15 arena artists worth going to see and until i can't produce a show that is worth going to see i won't stop doing shows you know and as for cashing in on old songs that's ridiculous that's 25 years of my life and this tour is like more like a wishing world tour isn't it what do you mean by that but people throwing a small coin into the wishing well actually and wishing yourself thinking i hope making a wish well i hope it's a bit more concrete than that uh in as much that of all the songs that i'm doing at 20 are sums that have been chosen by the public that are coming to see the show so i think that in itself is it enabled me to really do what i really wanted to do which was to let the audience have its choice on what kind of songs they wanted to hear and allows me the other four or five to choose my own particular favorites to put in um i think it's as it will be the last time i'll ever sing these songs i think it's been a good uh a good thing to do so the norwegian audience can actually vote for the songs that they would like you to play absolutely and they will certainly be taken into consideration i must stress that the majority of what we're doing now are from the responses that we initially got in england america and the parts of europe that had the phone system on if there are any radical developments in the song choices for scandinavia i would automatically put in the differences but i think the seven that we took out of each different continent pretty much sum up uh what people want to hear what is your favorite song last night it was station station but it does it depends on the the performance some some nights some songs are better than others and that changes a lot and the last night in berlin a stationary station was great so when you finish this concert are you gonna go back to tin machine yeah we finished recording the album um in australia just before this tour and that should be released by about the end of this year and then we'll be going out on the road and we'll choose the songs you

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Length: 12min 20sec (740 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021