So I've got a 30-min slot on the radio.
And you can read the script in advance right here.
This is for a scheduled, pre-recorded segment set to be published on the 9th January, the day between David Bowie’s birthday and the anniversary of his death.
MY THOUGHTS ON BOWIE
Hi, I’m Phillip. I’m a Science Fiction author and Poet, based in Manchester but really from Mars. And I became a poet because of David Bowie.
Bowie’s birthday was yesterday. And the anniversary of his death will be tomorrow.
So right now I’m a time traveller speaking to you on a symbolic day for any fan of David Bowie, of which I am sure there are hundreds listening now.
I just wanted to say, before we begin, thanks to Ruth at Allfm for letting me have this sacred slab of time. I hope to make it interesting. I’ll be talking about Bowie and his philosophies around art and music, and how to defy convention and experiment in creating new things. I’ll also be dropping in a few weird and largely unknown facts about Bowie, so stick around if you can.
To those who were recently 3D printed and are unaware of the outside universe, David Bowie was a songwriter, singer, artist, actor, and from his interviews alone, a better comedian and philosopher than a lot of people too. He taught me that to properly create a story, you have to be at least a bit out of your comfort zone. That you must always experiment, always step into what might scare you, even if it’s just to see what’s out there.
Bowie was prescient in a number of ways. On top of predicting where music might go ahead of time, he was also an early adopter of the internet. He created his own internet service provider, BowieNet, in 1998.
For $19.95 a month, you got access to exclusive content by Bowie, audio and visual (or should I say sound and vision), as well as access to chat rooms which Bowie himself would sometimes visit in disguise. And you got an official davidbowie.com email address, some of which may still be in use today. But if you just wanted access to the website and weren’t bothered about the email address or internet service, he had you covered. You could subscribe to davidbowie.com for just $5.95 a month.
Sounds a lot like Patreon doesn’t it? That subscription service many creators use these days to keep themselves going. Bowie was well ahead of time here.
Just a year later, in a 1999 interview with Jeremy Paxman, Bowie described the internet as “An alien life form” and said that “the potential of what the internet is going to do to society – both good and bad- is unimaginable. I think we are on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying”
Paxman wasn’t buying it, but Bowie was determined to put his point across. He argued the point about the interplay between creator and consumer, and how the internet would bring fans closer to performers, and enable weird new methods of collaboration.
Bowie said of the internet,
“it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about”
Bowie then joked about his song LIFE ON MARS and replied to the question of the song when talking about the internet with Paxman, saying,
“Is there life on Mars? Yes, and it has just landed.”
*LOVING THE ALIEN or LIFE ON MARS here if possible J*
So, we know that Bowie was prescient, perhaps a time traveller. But was he also an alien? He certainly made a convincing alien in the 1976 movie THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, based on the novel by Walter Tevis. And he came across as alien to me when I first watched LABYRINTH as a child, then again when I encountered his music videos and various interviews.
When interviewed about his writing in 1993, Bowie said
“there’s been a continuity of alienation and isolation throughout everything I’ve written so, if there is one thing that I talk about, it’s these slightly negative types of thoughts.”
He also said
“my characters came out from a need to not want to perform as myself.”
which I find really interesting as a writer. There’s a thing in fiction called a ‘self-insert story’ which is where the writer basically writes a character that is a clone of themselves, and implants that character in a heroic story, perhaps one that the writer wishes they would have been heroic in. These kinds of stories are always seen as juvenile, as silly. They can be used by writers for therapeutic reasons but I’ve never enjoyed them. It’s a popular trope, the writer writing a story about a writer who is writing a story about a writer. It could go on endlessly, and sometimes it does.
It’s interesting what Bowie said because he was going in the opposite direction. In his teens and twenties he was inventing characters, Ziggy Stardust, Major Tom, Alladin Sane, to act as performers on his behalf. He convinced himself that his work was far away from his personal life, and only in later years did he reflect and realise quite a lot of his real experiences had crept into his writing. I think that’s an important lesson to learn, especially for me as a poet, working with an art form that seems increasingly under pressure to be as plain and as confessional as possible. All we seem to see now are poems about breakups. I want poems about aliens lost in space, so I write them because nobody else is doing them. And I think that’s a valuable thing that Bowie can teach us too. If there isn’t any art out there that resonates with you, can create some.
Growing up I didn’t realise that Jareth the Goblin King was the same person whose songs blasted from my parent’s TV. My second taste of Bowie’s music came in the form of a BEST OF BOWIE cd. And as soon as I discovered Youtube in 2008, Bowie was my most frequent search term. I discovered the song ‘LAW (earthling’s on fire)’ at this time, and was inspired to write a dystopian Sci-Fi story that fit the song. It wasn’t a brilliant story, but every time I listen to that song now I am back in the zone. I’ll give you a few minutes now so you can listen to it.
*please play the song LAW (EARTHLINGS ON FIRE) here J *
Hi I’m back. If you’ve just tuned in I’m Phillip Carter. I’m an author who is going to be talking to you about David Bowie.
The main thing I learnt from David Bowie was transformation. I studied triple science in high school, and did really well, so thought maybe I’d become a physicist or a biologist. But by the time I got into college I had written a novella or two and enjoyed that a lot more than solving equations. I knew on some level that I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t have the confidence to do anything with my writing, so I hid it or gave it away. I had a friend who was a musician and I’d give her all the lyrics and poems I’d written. She still has them now, ten years later, which sort of feels a threat to any writer who has improved over the years.
I listened to Bowie a lot in college, particularly the song WE ARE THE DEAD which I basically had on loop for six months at one point. I was really getting into the darker, lesser-known stuff and found it fascinating that not only had Bowie written massively different songs, but he had also looked like different people at varying stages of his life.
Long curly hair in the late 60s, bright orange mullet in the 70s, a packet of yellow-painted instant noodles glued to his head for a bit of the 80s, then a mullet again. It seemed as if, with his haircuts and makeup and suits, that he was a musical Mister Benn, someone who would emerge from a changing room with a new look for each new song. He brought theatre into rock and pop music, and brought a rock star to theatre.
Interestingly, Bowie once remarked that had his life been different, he might not have become a musician, but that music at the time in the 60s felt a lot more mysterious than it felt in the 90s. He was drawn to the strange and controversial, which I think is what made his art great. He wouldn’t just let one genre live in isolation, he would mix things together in weird new ways.
*If there’s time, play a song here. It’s a good place for a break.
I’d pick I’M DERANGED (also by Bowie) but I don’t mind J*
At university I studied Creative Writing, and became a novelist in the same way Bowie became a pop star: It was a form in which I thought I could affect change, I could say something. I’d never had the chance to play with music as a kid, so poems happened instead, and those evolved into stories and those evolved into novels. So Bowie showed up a lot in my essays as an influence, as did Gary Numan and Jarvis Cocker. Even today I find myself more drawn to music than to other people’s books. I started writing because I wanted to read a very specific story, but I couldn’t find it so I just wrote it instead.
Jarvis Cocker actually voiced parts of the 2012 ‘BOWIE IS’ exhibition at the Victoria and Albert museum in London. I was one of the first people to see that. I got the coach down from Manchester in the middle of summer, wearing a paisley print velvet jacket that had landed on earth two decades before I had. I’d picked it up in the months before from a vintage clothing website, and I don’t think I’ve worn the thing since, so whilst I wrote this script I decided to tell my future self to wear it, which I am doing as I speak to you now.
We’d got the coach at about midnight from Manchester, arriving in London with enough time to feed ourselves and stumble to the museum. I think we were the fourth people in line, and the streets were deserted it was that early. I think we were about an hour early to the opening.
The BOWIE IS exhibition was a mysterious and immersive thing. Visitors were not allowed to take photographs of the inside of the place, and they had security imposing that rule, though I still managed a few blurry snaps of the gift shop.
There were loads of Bowie treasures littered around, organised by theme or show or era, so that you could walk through one darkened room to the next, time travelling through Bowie’s life. I spent a good amount of time staring at the Union Flag coat from the cover of the EARTHLING album, designed by Alexander McQueen. I also had a good look at the original ‘swagger stick’ from LABYRINTH, which was designed by Brian Froud to look a bit like a microphone, alluding to Bowie’s status as a rock star. I could do a whole three hour slot about Labyrinth, but I won’t, so let’s get back to the BOWIE IS exhibit.
You picked up a set of headphones on the way in, and Jarvis Cocker would appear inside your brain to guide you through the various stages of Bowie’s career. There was a poignant part about his childhood at the start, and an immersive story about how he was casted for LABYRINTH in what I call the Labyrinth Zone, because the whole exhibition was set out like the Crystal Maze. There were rooms with low ceilings and wide rooms with huge screens that stretched up forever, and beyond that a marble archway at the end of the exhibit hosted a two-floor-tall pyramid of wire and metal, into which oranges would tumble into a mechanical juicer. The plastic cups of fresh pure orange juice were also Bowie branded, with different bright orange stickers on the side.
Of course I purchased enough juice to get one of each sticker, and I still have them today.
Good break here. No song suggestion J
Bowie didn’t just mix genres for the sake of it. He also did it to escape a creative block before it even occurred. He once said in a 2002 interview,
“I had a way of working through musical problems through painting them out”
and once I heard that, I felt that we were similar in that way. I knew that if I ever got stuck on a story I’d just turn it into a poem or a song. But up until that point I had limited myself as an artist, telling myself that I had to be just one thing and that I couldn’t pick multiple. I guess this was some psychic hangover from being told in school that you had to pick a destiny and stick to it. I found that whole thing suffocating.
I knew from listening to Bowie’s interview, that I didn’t have to limit myself to other’s expectations of me. I could be an author, a poet, a painter, whatever. Any names people threw at me wouldn’t affect the art at all. I could just create things.
Bowie also had strong opinions on what it meant to be creative. What follows is my favourite quote by him. I had wanted to use this in my first novel, but I didn’t get permission for it before it was published.
“If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, then you’re not working in the right area. always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
I love that quote. I live by it. I think my own writing gets boring very quickly at the moment I stop taking creative risks. I know from the first book I’ve published that the people reading it really appreciated the weirdness of it. I think that’s something that audiences want, but that big companies aren’t necessarily going to bother investing in. Sometimes it’s best to go along on your own.
He also didn’t like conformism. The following quote is from the same interview.
“Never play to the gallery […] never work for other people at what you do. 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, that you would understand more about yourself and how you co-exist with the rest of society. I think it’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfil other people’s expectations. I think they produce… they generally produce their worst work when they do that.”
I think Bowie was more than a musician, he embodied a whole genre. He had such a unique style, and that permeated all his work, and he knew that and he refined it and built upon it for years.
I think today it’s important to think about what he embodied, who he was, and why he created so relentlessly. He never believed he was above anyone else for that endless creativity, and he was always ready to help out other artists and to collaborate with them when he needed to.
I think these days, people are obsessed with labels and with being loners, tricking themselves into thinking they are completely unique.
There are so many new identities that people affix names to, and I personally find that suffocating. It is existentially limiting to cram yourself into a list of attributes. It’s like a dating profile with a strict word limit, or a list of ingredients on a tin of old food. It isn’t a person, it’s just a surface level list of things that when added together, don’t make a person. It’s depressing.
Someone asked me a while ago what my ‘preferred pronouns’ were and I just made some up on the spot to amuse myself. It feels like such a limiting question when we could ask instead
“what music do you like?” or “what’s your favourite book?”
My point is that we are learning nothing about each other in this new discourse, but there is still hope. We can look to Bowie and think, Bowie was Bowie. We can look to ourselves and think,
“I am me. I am myself. I don’t need to be defined or entrapped by labels.”
because sure, labels help us categorise things. But people aren’t categories, they have rough edges and they are messy and they change their minds.
We should look back at the BOWIE IS exhibition. That was littered with phrases that jumped out from signs and projectors, from speakers and posters on the walls. There was even a peephole in one wall that made a point about how through art, we see new glimpses of reality. And how through song, we all felt that we knew Bowie, but we all knew a different piece, according to the angle from which we experienced his art.
I remember one of the BOWIE IS quotes more than the rest, because it perfectly encapsulated Bowie’s weirdness and yet, his humanity also. Because he wasn’t an alien, he was a highly creative man, a genius whose artistic work from decades ago is still being picked apart and deciphered by fans and scholars alike.
Here’s the quote.
“BOWIE IS A FACE IN THE CROWD”
Like Bowie, my writing throws me into a self-imposed existential crisis, so obviously I would connect with that sort of material. The falling Starman who wants to go back home, the disillusioned man who has no true place in society, the glam rock weirdo who doesn’t quite understand his contemporaries.
Bowie was restless, relentlessly creative.
So now we know who Bowie was, but do we know who we are?
END
*I am fine with any Bowie song here, though I’d prefer CHANGES*
Here’s a bonus bit. Couldn’t fit this anywhere, so it won’t be on the recording.
“If I can see or feel my own hand, my own workings within it, then it’s still too close to me and I’ve got to move it even further away, so it becomes something other than myself.”
- David Bowie
a lack of wordplay in modern poetry, and indeed in modern songwriting. I find that as you scroll on Instagram or Amazon, you find poetry collections which become increasingly shorter, and long ago, perhaps some time around 2015, the poetry in poetry collections was outweighed by line drawings of people’s anatomy and butterflies. There’s a big movement now, a push for poetry that is confessional but which is also relatable.
But the only way to make poetry which is both confessional and relatable is to write something that everyone else has probably experienced, so a lot of poetry now is turning into break-up poetry. You know every poet fancies themselves to be the next Taylor Swift or the next Adele of poetry, and I wonder if that comes from a place of emotional immaturity as well, if the way the internet has gone has meant people are forcing quite nuanced, complicated experiences into smaller and smaller boxes. Or maybe they’re just sad about their ex and expressing themselves, but it feels there are a lot of people sad about their ex.