Freak Out, at the V&A
/For Easter, I escaped from London and headed for the coast. That much is not so new. There is something about being close[r] to the sea. The sight and smell of the familiar shore clears the mind. The inland gentle breeze, now braces near the waves, which crash on the shingle, nonchalant, making me consider deep profundities, before I offer to buy my five-year old nephew an ice-cream. Working backwards a few days and I am back in London at the Victoria and Albert museum with a friend, erudite on the topic of pop music, David Laurie. We were privileged to taste the new David Bowie exhibition a few days before the paying throng. An intimate "exclusive" preview for a select crowd, which in reality meant several hundreds guests. The V+A have sold over 50,000 tickets for this smart show of memorabilia, costumes and nostalgia, suitably turned up to eleven. Go and see it, or rather, go and hear it, as the Sennheiser audio installation is superb. At the party, Doctor Who showed up which seemed appropriate for Bowie, who bridges decades and centuries in both sound and vision. I have been revisiting a rather fab tome called Strange Fascination by David Buckley. The story of the boy from Bromley (not Brixton) is riveting, from the suburbs of South London to become the morphing enigma that he is - with tunes to die for, writing imagery to wrap around buildings and songs that resonate and resound. We rightly love David Bowie at WYA towers (or even here from this seaside retreat) ever since I first heard his best/worst record on Radio 1 in March 1983. The record, Let's Dance, was born out of a chance meeting between Bowie (who "needed a hit") and guitarist/producer Nile Rodgers, in a club called The Continental in New York in October 1982. Although he anticipated a world-wide smash, Bowie could not have realised the impact that meeting with Rodgers and their subsequent collaboration would have on me six months later.
As a song it starts starts terribly, like some visit to the doctor to check your larynx, then the double-flange on the snare cuts immediately to a bass line groove and chopped echoing guitar. Bowie backed by Chic, and for me back then… the guy singing sounded SO cool. So, I didn't discover Bowie on Top of the Pops in 1972 singing Starman. EVERYONE I know (even those born in the 1980's) seems to have claimed that seeing Bowie singing his 'version' of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, with his arm draped around Mick Ronson, was how they discovered Bowie. No, I discovered Bowie at his most commercially popular and (to many) most risible. Let's Dance was released 30 years ago. Not five. The helming, guitar playing and production was from Nile Rodgers who has been a hit-maker for Diana Ross, Duran Duran, Madonna and others. Rodgers has been "blindsided" (his words) in recent years by his battle with cancer, but he is still touring with even an appearance at Glastonbury due this summer.
Freak Out.
