Original subtitles

Fascination with space predates all written history.

Think of the legends that come from the night sky and the endless possibility

that comes with pushing the edge of exploration.

You know, a star man.

How do you deal with the fact that you're different and the same as

else?

How do you find purpose within your own life?

I think Bowie grappled with that, being willing to adopt all those different

personas just to push the edges of understanding the core human experience.

If you're trying to imagine the very edge of possibility, a

black star is the manifestation of that.

It is such an immensely powerful gravitational force that it can distort

itself.

Does that then open up the possibility for time travel?

Or are the forces so high that nothing could ever survive it?

I would love to feel that what I did actually changed the fabric of music.

Always remember that the reason that you initially started working was that

there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest it

in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with

the rest of society.

As you can see, He knew he was dying. With Black Star, he's writing his own

Requiem and then dies a day or two after the album comes out.

Who does that?

It has echoes of his entire life, his entire career.

To understand what he managed to pull off in his death, you need to really re

-examine his artistic quest.

Bowie definitely was a cultural prophet in the end.

He became his barman. He became the ultimate time traveler.

Ladies!

Put on your red shoes and dance the blues.

Let's dance to the songs they're playing on the radio.

Let's play.

Oh, yeah.

When I first started with Dave, we were doing big theaters, like, you know,

Radio City size.

But then, the Sirius Moonlight tour, all of a sudden, we were playing stadiums.

It was...

It was huge. It was absolutely huge.

I represented David for 30 years.

You know, Let's Dance created this worldwide audience, and suddenly he was

superstar.

Oh, he's been on the road now for more than six months, touring through the UK,

Europe, Canada, the United States and Japan.

He remains the most influential pop performer to have emerged in the 70s.

not yet put a foot wrong through constant changes of musical direction

style.

I

just

felt sort of rather rootless after Let's Dance.

I didn't quite see where I fitted in anymore.

It's lovely to be acclaimed.

I just felt uncomfortable. I felt I was being categorized already.

And I felt that I didn't want whatever it was I'd sort of earned for myself

the success of Let's Dance.

And I really didn't know what I was looking for.

He just decided to go in another direction.

But, you know, it would have been nice if somebody told me.

I would describe him like a kid.

that has a room full of things to play with.

And they get sick of those things pretty quick.

I think he decided that he didn't want to be that world -renowned, famous pop

star for Let's Dance, and he wanted to explore different avenues and do

different things.

It was years later, he

formed Tin Machine.

the rock band that played hard rock.

My heart said, that's a great thing to do. My head said, financially, it's a

disaster.

David Bowie is the great chameleon of rock and roll, changing musical styles

about as often as the other stars change their leather pants.

This isn't Bowie with his backing group. This is a band with Bowie insisting

that he's just 25 % of it.

I think people find it an uncomfortable band at times because it's terribly

experimental. And so it'll be real interesting to see what they think of

Let me do that again.

If I had to explain what I was with David, it would be guitar player,

co -writer, band leader, co -conspirator.

I became his friend first. My former wife worked doing press in David's

I had this tape of my guitar playing, and she gave it to him and said, listen

this tape sometime.

A couple of months later, I answered the phone, and his voice says, hi, it's

David. And the accent didn't sound exactly right. He sounded sort of like

someone doing an English accent almost.

And I said, okay, who the fuck is this? And he started laughing.

He said, you know, I listened to the tape. You sound like the guitar player

been looking for.

In the 80s, after Let's Dance, he was running a little bit out of gas there, I

think. He felt like he was being lumped in with more pop acts like Phil Collins.

He did a commercial for Pepsi with Tina Turner.

That commercial kind of encapsulates everything that was wrong with where his

career had gone, I think.

He lost a feeling for...

who his audience was.

We were talking about all this music that we liked, and none of it seemed

reflected in what he was making.

The record you're saying you want to make is something that has more in

with the Pixies or more alternative to what you've been doing.

The gears really started to mesh at that point. We realized that we were going

to become this band.

Money goes to money heaven.

Bodies go to body hell.

I just call and catch the chain.

The song is I Can't Read.

Lyrically, that song, it's hard to know if he's saying I can't read shit or I

can't reach it.

And he mixes it up.

I can't reach it anymore.

I just can't ignore.

I think there was a little like midlife self -doubt there. You know, I don't

know if I can reach it anymore.

Some people got it, some people didn't, but he definitely seemed happier in Tin

Machine than he was during the 80s.

The 1980s were living in fascinating times.

What was going on in the world at the time was Tiananmen Square.

Turmoil with troops firing indiscriminately at unarmed civilians.

The Velvet Revolution.

Student power is at the vanguard of the drive for more freedom in

Czechoslovakia. The walls started to come down.

There can be few better illustrations of the changes which are sweeping across

this continent.

I remember standing in the studio and seeing all of this on the news and

thinking how insignificant what we were doing was compared with what was going

on in the world.

David told me when we were doing the first record, he was already booked to

do... what would become the Sound and Vision Tour.

It was like a greatest hits tour.

So no matter what we did, it was going to have to stop for six months while

tour happened.

Good afternoon, everyone.

Good afternoon, everyone.

I'm sorry?

It's not going to be my last talk, but I'm afraid that it probably will be the

last time that I'll be doing these songs.

There's no point continually reflecting on a past.

I won't be doing them ever again. As you know, I'm still working with Tim

Machine. That's what I'm enjoying best.

So I'll stay with that.

Which, the positive criticism or the negative criticism?

Which one do you want to know about? I didn't see much positive criticism.

well, you live in England.

The music press in the UK was once extraordinarily powerful.

What we'd said in the NME and the Melody Maker carried an awful lot of weight.

All over the world, people who were interested in popular youth culture were

gravitating to the British music press.

Tim Machine were regarded in the music business as something of an

embarrassment. There was this thing of, let's not mention them, let's hope they

go away quietly.

Do you think Tim Machine is a long -term project, or is it just a whim?

I think project might be the wrong word. I think band is the word. I would like

to think that we've got at least two more albums in this. That's what I'd

to think.

But you don't know, do you?

One way of looking at Tim Machine was it was his way of dissolving the whole

David Bowie thing.

When I look back on his early career, he was always completely ahead of the

curve. It felt like you were getting this glimpse of tomorrow, but now you

wanted to be this bloke in a band.

As alter egos and personas go, it wasn't the most fascinating that he'd come up

with.

When I arrived in London, it was...

April 1967.

This was the era of Beatlemania, the dawn of flower power.

To go to London, to me, was like going to the wonderful land of Oz.

The 60s were marvellous. The pill had just been invented, and this was a time

discovery for everybody.

The most amazing time for music. The new generation were a bit fed up with

hearing about the war and with having inherited.

what their parents wanted them to have. One thing that a lot of people forget,

that music is the very first thing that any kid owns.

You play the records in your bedroom and the most welcome sounds you could ever

hear was your parents at the bottom of the stairs going, turn that bloody

down, because then you knew you'd got something that was yours.

I first met David Jones as he was then at the Marquee Club before he became

Bowie. I loved his early music and his look because it was so clean and simple.

We were musical friends first and foremost.

Occasionally a bit of horizontalism came into it, but that wasn't the main

thing. It was just a bit of fun. You've got to learn your rope somewhere.

I was there for about six or seven months.

My boss called me aside and he goes, I want to play you a record of this artist

that we signed.

And he played this early DRAM album that David Bowie made.

My burning desire started on Sunday. Give me your heart and I'll love you

Tuesday. As you can see, he's kind of quirky. He's kind of all over the place.

David and I, we got on like wildfire. He became one of my best friends.

I suppose you thought you were listening to a long playing record just then.

Well, you weren't. You were listening to a new instrument, the Mellotron.

The Mellotron was a radical instrument.

It was like the first sampler. There was no such thing as digital sampling in

those days. It was just simply tape.

It had a sound of its own.

I mean, you put the control to strings.

And the truth of the matter is it didn't sound like strings, but it worked

really, really, really well for what it did. The problem was they went wildly

out of tune, but I found a way of keeping them in tune, which is how I got

first David Bowie gig with Space Oddity.

Ground control to Major Tom Take

your protein pills and put your helmet on

Ground control to make... They were very clever on how they put spaceology

together. The Mellotron strings didn't come in until the, what I call the

chorus. It gave it a spread, gave it some width.

Check ignition and may God's love be with you.

That's the Mellotron coming in there, if you like that.

like pad, drinks -type sound.

The spacemen had been going up at that time in real life.

David was very good at catching the zeitgeist.

This clip is probably the most perfect example.

He did have a love of space.

He lived for the present and the future. I remember going out and buying it.

when it came out, and playing it at home, thinking, this is wonderful.

If this is the direction that music's going in, I want to be a part of this.

1971,

the first Glastonbury. It was a new festival, and David was determined to

perform. Space Oddity had been a hit, but he wanted to be more than a pop

He wanted to be an artist.

So we went by train.

He had long hair at that time.

Nobody knew who he was.

When we got there, there was no taxi.

So we walked what might have been two or three miles in the blazing heat to get

to the festival in those days. I think people just wandered in. I don't think

anyone even paid to get in.

How are you coping with the cooking?

Oh, you could, but you've seen him all this while.

Can you tell me why you have come here?

Now, to Glastonbury, to the festival.

Such a meeting of energies.

I had to be here.

There were a lot of people, but not like now.

People weren't crushed and crowded together. There was just, you know,

headbands, men with long hair, girls wearing not very much.

It was all peace and love.

I remember sitting up on the pyramid, and David was meant to be put on at six

seven o 'clock at night. They weren't ready.

I think there was sound problem, but maybe not helped by the fact that

was on acid.

So it went later and later and later, and finally the organiser said to him,

only space that we have for you is to go on at five in the morning.

So I don't know where he spent the night, but we all came back in the

and he was up on the stage.

Just at that moment, the sun was sort of rising over the hill behind.

It was perfect.

Because it was so early in the morning, a lot of people were coming out of their

tents, rubbing their eyes with their hair all over the place, going, what on

earth is this music that's going on so early?

His voice was very pure and very good. I mean, he can't have slept much. I don't

think anyone slept much that night.

Now I'm much older, I think I appreciate the brilliance of some of his lyrics.

He liked to push himself to get to other places.

What is that? 50 -something years ago.

God.

Changes. In some ways, I think it's his first anthem.

This is a song that really speaks to young people who felt very displaced,

felt very disconnected from their own family, who felt alone.

Very vivid memories of that song in particular, just lying on my bed

there's something out there that I feel...

I feel connected to in such a beautiful, profound way.

You know, really, the only constant we have in life is change, but it's very

hard for us to accept as mortals. We generally tend not to really dig it too

much, but he had internalised it.

He could sense that something was happening. David wanted things to be

different, and boy, was everything different the moment he started to take

Of course, a big part of that was when Angie said, for goodness sake, we've got

to get rid of this hippie look.

A superstar of the Beat Age prepares to meet his public.

David Bowie spends two hours before a show caressing his body with paint.

Impromptu, isn't it?

In the 70s, I was a jazz musician.

I was only hired for eight weeks to go out on that first Ziggy Stardust tour in

America. I felt so overqualified with all my classical and jazz training. I

viewed it as almost like, well, this was an easy gig. I realized after two or

three shows, these guys were on to something, especially David.

We finished the first Ziggy Stardust tour just when...

The music was getting comfortable. He was done.

The Hammersmith show was monumental for many, many reasons. That's when he

retired the Ziggy band and the Ziggy music.

As you can see, he was nervous.

How long have we got?

Found it.

I mean, Mick Jagger's out there, Paul McCartney, Ringo.

It was a big show.

When we were rehearsing in the afternoon, I happened to sit at the

was playing some of his songs as reimaginings.

David was listening, and he said, why don't you open up the show like an

overture? I think he wanted to feel out the audience.

I was the perfect guinea pig.

So let me play you some stuff.

Please welcome from New York, Mike Johnson.

So it's some sort of a reimagining of space oddity.

The rest is history.

I was at the Hammersmith Apollo that night. I was 13.

In a way, Bowie was our Elvis. That's exactly who he was to us.

I was quite young, and I think, you know, those early days, your crushes are

the same sex quite often. You know, it might be a footballer.

In this case, it was this alien -type creature called Ziggy Stardust.

Watching that show, it was like I'd been invited into his space kit.

He's so androgynous at this point. In fact, he's not even androgynous. I mean,

he's really wearing women's clothes.

What we understood from David was you could be someone else. There wasn't just

fixed way of looking. One day you could be someone from the future and the next

day you could be someone from the past.

He wasn't just playing a loud rock and roll song, you know.

This guy is the Miles Davis of the rock world.

The night before that famous show was on in Hammersmith, I had been with David

and he was talking about how that was going to be the end of Ziggy.

You can see nobody else really seemed to know about it

You could see people losing their breath in the audience. It was like, really?

He basically was letting go of the band on stage.

Bye -bye,

we love you.

There was a sense of devastation.

as we all got the tube home that night, a sense of mourning that went round.

I think they thought it might have not been for real, but David knew it was for

real. He was killing off his character.

I knew this was going to be happening, but the band didn't know, and they were

my friends, so it was shocking.

I think David just didn't need anyone. Once he had got what he needed from

somebody, he dropped them.

And I think already David in his head was thinking about the next album he was

going to do. A caterpillar has to come out of its cocoon in order to become a

butterfly, and he was ready to take off for the next lot of amazing things.

I still find it fascinating that he would go to those lengths to reinvent

himself in a way that was possibly commercially damaging.

Hence Tin Machine in the early 90s, where he thought, I'll be a band, you

a really bad band with a really bad name.

Now music from a band formed only three years ago with a second album and a new

single, You Belong in Rock and Roll.

Keep an eye on their promising young vocalist.

Tin Machine.

When we finished the second record, we had these suits with no collars in

colors. I used to call them the Vulcan pimp suits.

They look like something out of Star Trek.

That bothers me more than the lip syncing.

I love how she moves me.

It makes me feel all right, all right, all right, all right.

One of the things David insisted on was he never did an interview by himself.

It's new. It's new for us anyway to see you part of a band rather than just

fronting a big spectacular.

Was it a deliberate attempt for you to go in another direction?

We just got around to jamming, really, and it just felt like a good thing to

So we're just doing it today.

What are you trying to do?

The fact that he was putting himself inside a band was

not what some of his fan base wanted. They wanted just David.

After the Sound and Vision tour, basically, EMI had said that they didn't

want... a second tin machine record.

So they terminated his contract early.

They set David free and gave him his catalog.

That was the deal.

I imagine it's just some suits in a boardroom deciding they didn't make

money off the first one. They wanted David to do Let's Dance 2.

They wanted him to be the same, and he wanted to be different.

We were pretty sure that we would find a home.

You know, you got David Bowie as your lead singer, so we ended up going with a

company called Victory for the second record.

We all knew that the second Tim Machine album was coming out. I remember

thinking, well, at least it can't be worse than the first, right?

Then, of course, I got a call from the office saying, we need you to review the

new album.

and we need it in by tomorrow morning.

Ah, here we go.

We might begin by listing some of the totally crap things about David Bowie

the last ten years. His suits, his tan, his shoes, his shirts, his fake Cockney

accent. This is the man who spent half a lifetime brilliantly redefining himself

and now finds himself at the age of 44 in a somewhat unlikely role.

of international laughing stock my god the poor deluded fool believes that this

glorified pub rock is what we want hot tramp we loved you so now for god's sake

sit down man you're a fucking disgrace so i wrote the review and it was

published next thing i know i pick up the phone early on monday morning and

alan jones the editor of melody maker and he said john we need you to come

the office i knew i was in for some kind of bollocking I walk into the office

and there's Alan Jones and Alan Edwards, who was David Bowie's long -standing

PR. He explained that he'd been out in Switzerland, sitting there doing some

work in the living room and David was at the other end of the living room

looking through the papers.

And Alan said, he suddenly heard this noise and he looked up and he realised

that David Bowie was crying.

Bowie had been reading my tin machine review.

I wasn't for a moment thinking that David Bowie would have any interest

whatsoever in what some Burke from the Melody Maker had to say about the second

Tin Machine album.

I thought that Bowie was so seasoned that he really wouldn't take any reviews

that seriously and just keep on rolling. But it shows that his ego was as

fragile as any other artist.

I think the poor reception of...

Almost everything that Tin Machine did would have been very bruising for him

because the reviews were tough.

I think a lot of mainstream people were alienated by the music. We cared

when we were completely misunderstood or if we were dismissed.

That was irritating and hurtful. We got irritated more than we got hurt because

we knew what we were doing was valid.

After the second record, the band sort of faded away.

It just moved on, really.

I don't think there was anything harsh about it or nasty about it. You know,

they'd done two albums and that was it. It wasn't going to last forever.

I think having a knockback like that when you've had enormous success for a

couple of decades would sort of take a pickaxe to your identity.

and makes you question whether you can still carry on in that game.

Imagine being one of those early astronauts.

The powerlessness of it if things go wrong.

How do you get ready for that?

How do you become a person who can accelerate to the incredible speed that

need in order to escape from Earth?

The forces outstrip anything else you've ever been in in your life.

You're getting relentlessly crushed until it's hard to just get a breath.

Life on Mars.

It makes me think about loneliness and the idea of life feeling alien within

actual environment where you live, where the family that you live in.

I was in Lou Josie Trill's home in Willingdon, Wolverhampton. We had

night and we could sit in the TV room and watch Top of the Pops.

I'll never forget how different he was than anything else.

Being lost.

And being out there, you know, being in the care system, lost souls, it felt

like it was part of you and you felt, you know, like you go in the garden and

hang upside down.

Try to imagine space.

All artists, you do your best work all the time.

And some of it, people think it's fantastic, and some of it, people just

it's shit. But, you know, you don't know that in advance. You just do your best.

And so 1993 begins.

Goodbye to the old and hello to the new.

When I knew him in the early 90s, he felt that people were kind of forgetting

about him and he was kind of disappearing.

He was a bit worried that his time was over, it was gone, and he didn't have

anything else to give.

I went to do an interview with him in Chalk Farm for a magazine.

He had this very unusual level of charm.

Everybody wanted to know him and be with him, you know, it must have made him

crazy. David said he'd been reading my book, The Brother of Suburbia, and I

think he liked the book because it reminded him of where he came from.

Where we were in the suburbs, it was painstakingly boring.

It was just this great slab of concrete with nine -to -five commuterism.

Absolutely no future but this bleak, almost Orwellian world.

And there just seemed no way out. And we just wanted some kind of colour,

exhilaration in our lives, I think.

Many of us just opted for anything that was available, just grabbed hold of it

and said, that's my way out.

When we were doing The Bureau of Suburbia on telly, we filmed all around

London.

The series is a kind of comedy about a young mixed -race boy who's half

half Indian, Pakistani, growing up in the suburbs in the 70s, who discovers

sexuality by having sex with Charlie Hero, his schoolmate.

It's about coming of age, it's about bisexuality and what it's like to grow

mixed -race in the UK.

The poor, the foul, the false.

Love counts, I admit.

Charlie Hero really comes out of all the kids in Bromley who wanted to be David

Bowie. You'd walk up Beckenham High Street, I remember running into a friend

mine, he was dressed almost entirely in tinfoil. He looked like a salt -and

-pepper shaker. And this was Bowie during his silver period.

David said he wanted to write original music for the soundtrack.

He was a man who always wanted to do new things, you know. He was always looking

for someone else who would turn him on.

Art is a collaborative form, and I love finding new people to work with,

just as he did all the time. Now I work with my son Carlo because I can't use

my hands, and he types and writes with me, and we do stuff together.

So great to see that video.

Giving in lines by the railway line Pushing

the hair from my eyes Elvis is

English and climbs the hill Can't tell the bullshit

from the lines Bowie looks so good and he looks so cool. It's very moving to

him. It's quite a nostalgic song, actually.

You know, it's about... He talks about Elvis.

He talks about being bisexual.

Sometimes I fear That the whole world is queer

Sometimes but always in fear

So I'll wait and deal with time

It's a very sweet video. It's about...

A man returning to a place where he grew up, thinking about it, walking through

it, and making music that would rather resemble the music he made in the early

70s, actually. It's as though he's looking back.

When I

first

got invited to play with Bowie, it was 1974, right?

The androgynous thing was kind of peaking at that point. He didn't have

eyebrows. Just seeing him walk through the door was a trip.

New York was very happening in those days. If you happen to like Studio 54 or

whatever, David was just absorbing the American lifestyle, which, let's face

was far more interesting than Bromley.

So we started off on the Diamond Dogs tour.

It was a whole big extravaganza show, but he wanted to

change things up. He was already starting to write stuff for young

Okay, what do we got here?

Oh, look at me with my little 1970s clothes on. Terrible.

Oh, my God. Look how young Davey Sanborn is. Holy shit.

He looks really good on

camera when he's singing.

There's Avid and Luther, Vandross and Robin Clark, Jeffrey McCormack. It was a

damn good sounding band.

Young Americans, that's basically...

David's new soul guy thing going on.

The sound changed a lot.

It wasn't a surprise because if you just go back to album from Hunky Dory on,

each one of them was markedly different than the next one. But as an artist, he

was not afraid to go into that danger zone.

For me and lots of my friends, Young Americans was the record. That was the

felt so different and so sophisticated, just kind of innately stylish and kind

of fantastic.

Partly he was embracing America with a music that he had completely co -opted.

He once said that Young Americans was his fake soul record or ersatz or

whatever. I think it's one of the best soul records ever made. I think it's

amazing.

He would find the most glittering...

cultural and musical nexus of that moment, and he would transmute it in his

way. With varying degrees of popular success, it must be said, but he was

experimenting. He would say that he approached his music more like an art

director. Most originality, I think, comes out of recombination.

You don't reinvent the wheel, but you redesign the wheel.

and you put the wheel on something no one's seen before, that's invention.

And David was always looking for the new thing.

In the 90s, rape came like a tsunami, and it came out of the political mess

country was in. The new criminal justice bill. Provisions include giving police

new powers to act against rape parties.

The most comprehensive program of action against crime that has ever been

announced. The bill has brought together a coalition of protesters.

They might as well have got a bucket of petrol and gone, throw it on the fire.

David was always drawn to counter -cultural forces.

He wasn't thinking about Britpop or Oasis.

It wasn't about having a central figure prancing around on the stage anymore.

It was about the DJs playing these songs and they take this record and they take

this one and they put them in the mix and in this space in the mix.

They're creating something that you've never heard.

Bowie saw that really early on. The first time I met David, it would have

1995.

And then years later, he lived close enough to me that we could wave to each

other from our respective roof decks.

We ended up working together a lot.

It would just make sense that he would hear electronic music in the 90s and

think, huh.

This is genuinely new.

And like the guitar music of the early 90s was pretty conventional, whereas

culture wasn't. And so I think he was really excited by that.

Timeless was my coming of age album. From an English perspective, it was

something that was so new, hadn't been done before.

I knew it was going to open up a massive door.

I was looking for a place where we could find a home.

And Blue Note came in Hoxton Square. And what a club.

It was like this really Stranger Things version of Studio 54.

The queue was round the block and it was a basement.

So the sound couldn't go anywhere.

When David used to come to Blue Note, he was soaking it up.

just taking in this energy.

And I remember you'd come out of his furnace, dripping wet, and you'd sit on

steps, and he'd just roll his cigarette.

He'd be like, see what goes, that energy in that club.

It's like nothing else. It just surrounds you.

Everyone's really lovely people, really beautiful.

If I would have said to myself in Lou Josu Children's Home that in 30, 40

from then, I'd be working with him in the studio.

Would you like to relate to me?

There's no way on God's green earth he would have been like... I felt so

proud of it because he's a really important artist.

We finished a concert somewhere in England and David said, let's go over to

rave and we'll be in a tent.

and the lights will be dim. We'll just do instrumental improvisation. And we

did.

We were joking about, in the Financial Times, there's the Dow Jones Index. So

decided to call the band the Dow Jones Index, but spelled T -A -O.

When we were the Dow Jones Index, I'm thinking of everything I learned going

raves and things like that.

The only live thing on stage was David Sack.

All that stuff crept into the Earthling record.

The Earthling record is not a drum and bass record or an EDM record.

But it was influenced by all those things. And that is David at his best,

when he picks and chooses the things that he likes and then puts

it in music that is his.

Little wonder, we were joking one day about alternative seven dwarfs,

like instead of sleepy and grumpy, what if you had junky and druggie? And they

are in the verses, but they're fused in a more oblique way.

You really hear that drum and bass beat there. But the drum and bass stuff in

the mid -90s didn't have a lot of melody. But the song is catchy.

And as you can see, his artistic sense is incredible.

For me, His dabbling in dance music I don't think was particularly successful

because it didn't feel real. It felt like he was latching onto something.

It's David Bowie doing drum and bass.

It'd be like David Bowie doing heavy metal or country music. It just felt a

weird. In the course of my life, I've experimented with tons of different

and instruments and instrumentation. And from a career perspective, it's one of

the stupidest things you can do.

If your priority is a career, you pick a sound, it works, you stick with it.

The moment you start experimenting, you have to understand people are going to

be annoyed. People are going to lose interest.

People are going to get mad at you. But you do it because you want to, because

you're driven by the love of the new, because you want to experiment

And obviously, David, his priority was really, you know, like pushing himself

and experimenting.

That was one of the really important things I've been inspired by, that you

and do have the ability to reinvent yourself and start like it was like,

the first day of the rest of my life.

The end of the 90s, it was a very weird time.

It felt quite upbeat.

There was a lot of optimism still. You know, the Labour government hadn't been

in long. It felt like, you know, things could only get better. But also, there

was a lot of fear.

Remember the Y2K thing? We all thought at the stroke of midnight, 2000, the

planet was going to, like, end or something. It felt like we were

between two worlds, one that was in the past and one was in the future.

It sounds so weird to say this now, but David Bowie at that point

was... I don't want to use the word irrelevant, but almost sort of like,

whatever. It's kind of odd that we revere this extraordinary person, quite

rightly, but there was a period, quite a lengthy period, where he just wasn't

cool.

In the 90s, David...

Wasn't over happy about anybody suggesting he should perform Ziggy

the songs that went with it. He felt like it was the past and he was more

interested in the future, I would say. It became a situation where you wouldn't

bring it up really because you knew what his opinion was and his attitude was. I

had the genius idea of why don't we play Glastonbury next year?

You know, every artist of decent stature has headlined Glastonbury.

To perform to that many people lifts artists to a different level.

We were playing this Storia with essentially the drums and bass and stuff

went with it. So I invited the organiser of Glastonbury Festival, Michael Evers,

who sadly walked out halfway through the show because he didn't think David was

performing all of the hits and he just thought it wouldn't go down well as a

headliner.

The next day I went with Alan Edwards to the Spice Girls and Alan introduced me

to journalists and she said, have you got any gossip?

I had nothing to say of any consequence, so I made up the story.

I said, yeah, Glastonbury are begging David Bowie to headline next year.

Never thought twice about it.

And then a week later...

I open the paper, and there's a half -page spread about Glastonbury want

Bowie, and Michael suddenly gets all these letters, faxes, phone calls, and

eventually ends up making me an offer for David to play. I thought, fantastic,

I've cracked it.

And I phone up David and say, I've got this offer.

David said, great, thanks very much indeed, but I can't do it.

I said, what do you mean you can't do it?

Headline in Glastonbury is huge for any artist.

At that point, where people had the level of ambivalence towards him, I

it must have felt like quite a big thing.

I thought I was in shit street. I thought I'd blown it completely and I

desperately trying to think how I could resolve it and make it happen.

Good evening. NASA had been hoping to hear that the Mars polar probe had

two hours ago. We'll be hearing very shortly from David Bowie about whether

thinks there's life on Mars. Did I read somewhere that you said if you were 19,

you wouldn't go into the music business?

I wanted to be a musician because it seemed rebellious. It seemed subversive.

felt like one could affect change. It had a kind of a call to arms kind of

feeling to it. This is the thing that will... change things. Now it's a career

opportunity, and the Internet now carries the flag of being subversive and

possibly rebellious. You don't think that some of the claims being made for

are hugely exaggerated?

I don't think we've even seen the tip of the iceberg.

I think the potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both

and bad, is unimaginable.

I think we're actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.

It's just a tool, though, isn't it? No, it's not, no.

No, it's an alien life form.

What do you think, I mean, when you think then about... Is there life on

Yes, it's just landed here.

It's 1999.

Everybody thinks the internet is just for emails, but he foresaw it. He

that it was about to change society and... Such a huge win.

I think that Barry definitely was a cultural prophet.

He always had this, the amazing Mr Truffle, the idea he could sniff out or

change coming.

I still think that's one of the greatest interviews he's ever done.

I did the first Lastenbury.

I think I might be up for doing another one quite shortly, which will also be

something I could definitely consider. I don't know, though. I haven't made up

my mind.

There was a period of time when it wasn't going to happen and I was really

worried about it because I thought it was daft to turn down the opportunity.

So I thought, you have to persuade him it's a good idea.

I said, well, if you don't do it, somebody else of the calibre of Madonna

do it and you'll miss the point forever.

And eventually he thought, fuck it, David Bowie should play Glastonbury. It

creates history.

Welcome to the new millennium.

At the end of the 90s, I guess, him and Reeves Cabral just weren't happening

anymore. Reeves left.

I loved what we did.

I mean, he gave me a career.

But at the end, I felt like he was entering a phase where he was looking

over his life.

You know, I was 10 years younger.

He said a funny thing. He wanted to make music for his generation.

He wanted to put together a band that was more of the classic Bowie sound,

whatever that would be.

I said...

To David, I think I need to go now. It was time to cast a new movie.

And he flew me in.

And the first thing that David said to me, he said, we're going to play Stay.

He loved that song.

I was trying to be polite, and I had my amp at kind of medium volume. He goes,

what happened to you? Turn that fucking thing up.

I played that and a smile broke out on his face and it was amazing.

And that was it.

Done.

Back in.

What I knew about Glastonbury when we were booked to do it was that it was

huge festival and that if you got the headline that you had to be pretty big.

knew that Glastonbury meant a lot to him. 30 years had passed since he did

first performance.

He put us on a little short tour so we could get tight.

Glastonbury was imminent.

It was close.

I can remember during that week, his voice was just kind of gone.

Somebody made an executive decision to cancel a warm -up gig in New York City.

You can't blow Glastonbury when you're headlining, you know?

I went down in the coach with David and the rest of the band.

David and I sat at the front of the coach, just talking.

He was quite nervous.

It was like his big comeback.

He had a sore throat.

His assistant, Coco, she told him to shut up because he was about to do a big

gig and wasn't supposed to spend hours talking to me.

But he was talking, he wanted to talk.

The Glastonbury Music Festival is in full swing. After 30 years, it's proved

popular as ever.

So great is the demand that scores of people without tickets have been looking

for gaps in the perimeter fences.

By the end, I think Glastonbury was a cultural moment.

It was absolutely huge.

We got there early.

Just to do a quick sound check.

Right before the show, his assistant comes in, she goes, David needs to

your boots for the show. I said, what the fuck are you talking about?

He said, he got these new boots and he doesn't like them.

I'm like, why is that my problem?

So she gave me the shoes, right, and we wear the same size.

I said, you know what, here's my boots, and I put on my Chuck Taylors, because I

wasn't about to break in a new pair of pointy boots on a show like that.

The level of expectation was extraordinary.

In the back of my brain, I thought he's not stupid. He's going to play a few

hits, come what may.

But I thought he'd probably do them at the end of the show.

He wouldn't play the whole set as such.

But I think he made a decision.

That's the biggest crowd I've ever seen in my life.

I mean, it just went on and on.

Never ended.

Must have been like 250 ,000 people. That was massive.

I know people who get terrified and just puke before a show, right?

Dave and me, we're very similar in this way.

We would get antsy, right?

Not like stage fright, but antsy, you know, like... I was one of the

for the BBC coverage.

It's a moment we have all been waiting for. The thin white suit returns to

Glastonbury. The last time he said yeah is 1971.

I was like, yeah, here's David Bowie. Like, completely nonplussed. It's like

it's David Bowie. Like, have some reverence.

I remember being right outside the steps that lead up to the stage, and I looked

out there, and I think David did too, and I felt David get nervous.

He said, go out and warm up the audience.

The last time he asked me to warm up the crowd was in 1973 at the Hammersmith,

the same thing. I said, what?

Then I played this crazy version of Greenfleet.

The audience, they're getting restless. They don't know what's going to happen,

and I'm the only one on stage. I actually played Greensleeves faster than

normally play it because I wanted to be done with it.

And then the band comes on, thank God.

standing right at the bottom of that chair.

He walks on and there's a little bit of trepidation.

His first words are, love me, love me.

Love me, love me, love me, love me, save me too.

Let me fly away with you.

Oh, my love is like the wind.

There's no wind.

Wild as the Wind is one of those songs.

There's a fragile vulnerability to it.

Facing a crowd of that scale.

At that time in his career, it would have been running through his head. Is

something I can do?

Oh, thank you so much.

Thank you.

Oh, Glastonbury.

You've got a very, very lucky face.

All of you.

I'm very fearful tonight, as I got struck down by laryngitis earlier this

So if I give out, and if any of you know any of the words, for God's sake,

join in.

I can't remember.

Oh my, shut up. I remember this.

It's a god of a small affair to the girl with a massive head.

And her mommy is yelling no.

And her daddy has told her to go.

But her friend is nowhere to be seen.

Great hair.

And she walks through the sunken dream.

This almost brings me to tears looking at this shit. It does. I get chills on

this. And she's hooked to a silver screen But the film's a

sad and poor Cos she's lived it ten times or more

The notes are there.

Well, he hasn't got laryngitis, I'll tell you that. They ask her to focus on

Satan's fighting in the dance hall

Look at those cavemen go.

It's a freaky show.

Take a look at the old man beating up the wrong guy.

Old man.

Wonder if he'll ever know.

It's the best -selling show.

Is there life on board?

Wow. So he had emerged into a new millennium and it was just

perfect. That was where everything shifted.

He's almost like taking the crowd by the hand and saying, come with me.

It's going to be OK.

Right on the money, man. Right on the fucking money.

Damn.

He's killing it.

He's killing it.

I wish they'd show his fingers. I want to see my boots.

And there you have it.

I remember when he came off stage, he was so relieved, man.

And he ran up to Duncan, his son, and they embraced and David cried

because it was such a triumph. He did such a great gig. They played so well.

That was the moment, the turning point, after ten years, not in the wilderness,

but there, and suddenly it went back to there.

It's like growing into your own skin, and it reinvented his career, really.

Glastonbury was the last time I saw him. I didn't see him after that.

David Bowie would get very close to people very quickly, become mates with

and then he'd drop them and find someone else.

Some people were very resentful of that, very annoyed about that, but I saw it

was necessary for him.

He got everything he wanted out of me, and that was that as far as he was

concerned.

The reality tour was a really big tour.

It was the best band we ever had, the best performances we ever did.

It kicked ass.

I think after the Glastonbury, David got comfortable with his back catalog. He

must have recognized nothing wrong with a balance, new stuff and old stuff. And

you have to be respectful to the music you created and the fans who love that.

It's not a sellout. It's bringing you joy.

What do you feel right now?

I enjoy the songs a lot, so I'm going to have a good time.

There were a couple of different Davids. There was the 70s David, the 80s David,

and then the 21st century David.

And I loved the 21st century David to death. I really did. We were older and

cleaned up, but, you know, we both suffered from really fucking bad

at times.

Really bad.

What did Winston Churchill call it? The black dog, right?

I said, it's happening again.

And we would talk through it, you know.

And when he would get like that, everybody in the band was trying to talk

him. I would stay away because, you know, when he gets like that, leave him

alone. He'll figure it out.

All the shit is coming up. We can't wait to bring our show to you.

Whatever the show is, it'll be fun. All right. See you there.

When we did the Prague show, you know, some of these venues in Europe, the

places are kind of weird. It was really hot in this place that day. Fucking

really hot.

If I remember correctly, he wanted to start the show with

life on Mars.

And he couldn't hit the notes. It was weird.

Something looked odd.

As a...

and having played for so many singers, there's a connection.

I could feel my hands tighten up when I was accompanying him.

Something was going on.

He was in pain.

On a telepathic level, I was feeling that.

He saw the doctor and they told him it was a muscle

spasm. And then we did the hurricane festival.

The hurricane festival in Germany is a big one. And he looked like hell. He

didn't look good.

His skin color didn't look good. I thought, oh, fuck.

They're not telling us everything is the first thing that I thought.

And the second the show was over, they zoomed him to the hospital, you know.

He had an artifact.

It was a very weird ending.

And then there was kind of just silence for a while.

Nine years of it.

David Bowie.

required emergency heart surgery in Germany.

No longer a space oddity, it appears Bowie is the man who finally fell to

I don't think I'm as obsessive as I used to be by any means.

Feelings of alienation kind of dissipated over the last ten years for

I live a very fulfilling life with my chosen partner and family.

I'm very lucky.

I used to work on The Breakfast Show and Six Music, so I was always up very,

very early.

And I got a call one day from a friend of mine who worked with David Bowie.

And he said, will you be up at five o 'clock tomorrow morning?

I said, yes.

I wake up in the morning, drag myself out of bed, look at my phone, and there

is.

The announcement of a brand new David Bowie single.

This is his first single in years. The first music we've heard from him in

years.

And so we download it and we get it out on air as soon as we possibly could.

Well, this is massive and totally unexpected music news.

David Bowie has a new album and a new single. I can't describe how scared I

It's better been good.

Or, oh, it's going to be heartbreaking.

Now, he's been a virtual recluse for the past few years and has been rarely seen

in public in his New York home, which made it all the more surprising this

morning, the day of his 66th birthday at about 5 .15 a .m. There was a press

release confirming a new single and his first studio album in a decade.

We knew that the song was going to break in London.

David wanted it to be a complete surprise.

And suddenly, there it goes. He's playing it. He's playing it now.

And then we watched the Internet light up like, you know,

this row of like, David Bowie made a new record. What the fuck?

Had to get the train from Potsdam up there.

It's such a beautiful, fragile, eloquent.

This song is

about the

fond memories of living in Berlin, the freedom he enjoyed being a relatively

unknown person.

He was being more introspective, looking at his past.

At some point, most of us will do that, you know, look back and go, well, that

was good. That was good.

But there's a lot of sadness in that song, too.

And all day, I was like the treasure cat. I'm sure he was, too. I was

from ear to ear that we managed to keep this quiet.

David Bowie was back, and everyone claimed that he was finished.

He was never going to make another record again. And then he did it. He

it off.

I started working with Tony

when I was 23, so that was...

2013.

And I got home one night and he sends me this email and it says like, hey Aaron,

I just wanted to give you a heads up about our schedule tomorrow. We're going

be working with a client, Mr.

X. I'll tell you what's going on when you come into the studio tomorrow.

And I got to the studio that day and Tony said, so David Bowie's coming in

today. And I was just like, okay.

David walked in. You could smell him before you could see him. He always,

smelled so good, his cologne.

And just that, like, big grin.

And he was like, hi, I'm David.

And I was like, hi, I'm Erin.

For the rest of those next several years, I was with Tony and David in

little studio in New York.

David was...

an artist in every sense of the term, and it was very much his music. But he

also knew exactly who he wanted to work with and how he wanted to work with

them. I remember he wanted to, like, check out Donny McCaslin and his band.

I remember sitting in Tony's studio watching those YouTube videos.

As you can see in the video, every member of that band is a virtuoso.

They don't make mistakes.

I remember saying, like, what do you think of this band?

They're pretty incredible, aren't they? I was like, yeah, because I think I want

them to do the record.

Before we started recording, David phoned me up. He goes, can I see you?

come to my office? I'd like to have a chin wag.

I said, sure, you know.

And the very next day, we had to start the Black Star album with the studio

musicians. So I go to the office, and I notice the person who works for him,

she opened the door for me to let me into the offices.

And she had been crying.

Her eyes were red.

And so she leads me into this small room with a little table and a seat on

either side.

And she said, David, we'll be with you in a minute.

He sits in front of me, and he's got a woolly cap on, right? And the first

I notice is that he's got no eyebrows anymore.

And I went, I know what that is. That's chemotherapy.

I cried my eyes out. He's my lifetime friend, you know, since the 60s.

I started mumbling things like, don't worry, we'll get through this. We'll get

the best doctors in the world. You're strong. You're going to get over this.

I just started blabbering shit like that.

And he comes on my side of the table and he starts hugging me.

Given what he knew about his own health and all that, I think he wanted to make

the best album of his life.

We had set up in the studio the night before.

We were all pretty nervous and pretty on edge to meet David Bowie. And we stood

up when he walked in, like almost like soldiers at attention or something.

And he was immediately like, guys, just sit down, relax, like it's all good.

So they're all ready to go. He walks in and does the same thing. He goes, guys,

he goes, before we start.

I have something to tell you. He pulls his cap off, and he's standing there,

bald in front of them, and they're looking at each other like, who wants to

away? Who wants to crawl under their piano?

What the fuck do you say?

It was certainly a total shock and surprise.

Very few people knew how he wanted it. David told us in the beginning,

I don't know what this was going to be.

Let's just make some great music.

Just remember that we start to play the intro, and then David comes in

with the intensity.

This song, it makes me very tearful.

He's talking about his disease.

It would be like the worst thing in the world to tell people he's ill.

Elvis wouldn't have done it.

The Beatles wouldn't have done it.

And he's right up there with the rest of those iconic guys.

We'd ask him how he was doing and everything, but he didn't want to focus

that. He wanted to focus on the music.

It was intense.

Yeah, it was definitely intense.

It was serious work. I don't know how else to put it, you know. What would you

do if you knew you only had X amount of time? I think it's one of those morbid

thoughts that we as humans have about our own mortality. I don't know if he

how much time he had, but what I saw was that he showed up to the part of life I

was witness to, which was making music with such excitement and joy and

presence. I mean, if anything were to convince me that he was, like,

otherworldly, that would be it.

He's different from other human beings.

I'm only speculating, but it probably encouraged him to, like, write as much

he could and record as much as he could because he knew the end was near. I

didn't. I didn't know that.

I don't know many artists that recorded an album with the clear knowledge that

they were going to die.

When you watch this video, it infuses everything.

It's a black

star.

It's this ominous, unavoidable event.

And there's the spaceman.

I'm on the floor, gone as far as he can possibly go.

Miles and miles away from home, having achieved something amazing.

If you're trying to imagine the very edge of possibility, a

black star is the manifestation of that.

It is such an immensely powerful gravitational force that it can distort

itself.

You can see how important the recurring theme of space

was to him. But even black stars will eventually lose their energy

and go to the eternity of nothingness that awaits everything.

I had listened to Black Star. It had come out, and I went to bed. I'm sort of

anti -superstition, and I'm probably an atheist that would like to be surprised.

And I woke up, and my wife asked me, you know, are you okay?

And I said, I just had the strangest dream. I had a dream that David had

away.

Good morning. Breaking overnight. Legend lost. Rock star David Bowie has died.

I can't believe I'm even saying this. It's not news that I want to be

but we can confirm.

David Bowie died peacefully today, surrounded by his family after a

18 -month battle with cancer. David Bowie was 69. He released his final

Black Star, just on Friday, which was also his birthday.

When I heard on the radio it was that he'd passed away, I

remember my wife coming down and saying, you look shell -shocked, and I said,

David Bowie's died.

And we sat down together and shed a few

tears. I've lost family members that didn't affect me like that, you know.

It just gets me, that one.

I was really upset.

Really upset.

You know, it's that thing, you know, we're only here for a minute.

And then he was gone.

I think Lazarus showed a lot of grace.

He came to grips with death, and he was able to express it through his

music.

He wrote his own requiem. He does that.

Look up here, I'm in heaven.

I've got scars that can't be seen.

I've got trauma that can't be stolen.

Everybody knows me now. It's almost like he had a strength back in his voice

that had gone for a while.

I think it was his best work, if I'm really honest.

Look up here, man, I'm in danger.

I've got nothing left to lose. Watching the video and listening to the lyrics,

it's very poetic.

I'm so high, it makes my brain whirl.

He was a genuine spaceman, a genuine explorer.

I think it's about a departure to another realm.

I can't even play the blackthroat.

It's so unbearable.

It's such a sad album. Beautiful, beautiful music.

I get so moved and upset by that video.

I honestly...

didn't know he was that ill. Because his voice there sounds great.

It doesn't sound ill.

I find it amazing.

And the video that goes with it, going into the cupboard, it all

suddenly became apparent.

I would love to feel that what I did actually changed the fabric of music.

Always remember that the reason that you initially started working was that

there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest it

in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with

the rest of society.

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