Album Review # 35 David Bowie - Scary Monsters

 

An anecdote. More than twelve years ago and I was teaching in Katowice, Poland. I'd invited a few friends around, to play Risk. An American girl, Heather, and her British boyfriend, a mate of mine and my own girlfriend of the time. The American girl was perhaps not known for her manners. Brusque might have been another way of putting it. We set up the board and I put a compilation cassette on. Something from Bowie came on, I think Hunky Dory, still probably his friendliest album. Heather scowled her disapproval, immediately made a number of disparaging remarks about him and went on to say that his music was not allowed in their  household. I was somewhat nonplussed to see such a great body of work rendered immediately worthless by a houseguest but bit my lip. She went on to lay in to Kate Bush, when she came on and then have a go at me for not having any carrots in my fridge as she was feeling peckish. Heather, I've kept calm for almost twelve years but now must speak out. For such obvious abandonment of music rationale of any kind and as a fan of Country Roads, Take Me Home, you were very lucky not to be asked to leave my flat immediately. Fortunately, you didn't win the game of Risk! I do do carrots now though.

 

 

I can't claim to be an authority on Bowie. This is a matter of circumstance, as when I came of age, working out my own taste, the album he was busy conquering the world with was Let's Dance. It's a slick and highly polished exercise in blue eyed ersatz soul that left me, and still leaves me utterly cold. It took me years to really discover him as a result.

 

With time I've come to see the error of making a general judgement on the basis of that album. I now have a thick stack of Bowie records, the ones you'd expect, nothing post this. It's generally considered his last truly great album, the one that bookends and brings a full stop to his remarkable set of Seventies albums.

 

 

It also has a reasonable claim to have kick started the Eighties. Bowie clones were flooding in from the margins by this point, young musicians for whom Bowie was the influence that mattered. The man who'd lived the life and written the manual. Bowie more than anyone was aware of this of course, he pointedly invited Steve Strange of Visage and The Blitz club to play a part in his Ashes to Ashes video to spell it out for those not paying attention.

 

 

Scary Monsters is a remarkably put together object. A very energetic documentation of exhaustion. Not about wanting to be a star this time or about being one, but about what it does to you and how you learn to cope with it knowing you're not going to stop being one.. Nothing less than a work of art. From the sleeve, with Bowie in his pierrot  costume, staring out the lens, his blue and green eyes accentuated. A defining image to stack on top of all those other defining images he'd constructed and discarded in rapid succession over the preceding years. Schizophrenia as a career plan.

 

 

There's a melancholic, hard won wisdom to much of the record. Bowie choosing life:

 

'This album is about the inevitable sell-out of the counter-cultural rocker as he/she realises their passion is a fashion, just like everything else, and the kids will not make the world a better place, so accept the conventional pop career, or drive yourself insane, make your choice.'

 

Bowie can't really be blamed for this. He'd realised where the end of the line for the journey he'd embarked on, namely alienation, isolation and quite possibly death early on with the tracks Space Oddity and Ziggy Stardust and then preceded to actually go there in the wonderful series of records he made in the late Seventies, Station To Station, Low, Heroes and The Lodger. Scary Monsters is the sound of him crawling from the wreckage.

 

 

But it's also a stunningly good record. Side 1 sounds track by track like a Greatest Hits album. It's certainly a damn sight better than most peoples'. A book could be written about these five songs alone but I won't. I won't write about these songs individually. They're public property. As I said I'm not a Bowie authority so I'll leave it to those who are, but it's perfectly clear that these are songs made by a man who has been indescribably deeply scarred by personal experience, much of the damage self-inflicted of course, but who is emerging from it all wiser and willing to catalogue it all with unbelievable deftness and fluency and no little humour and grace. Side 1 is just imperial. Listening to it now is not unlike watching all those clips of the great Dutch footballer of the Seventies Johan Cruyff twisting and pirhouetting past dumbstruck opponent in the 1974 World Cup. He was peerless. Lou Reed and Iggy Pop had clearly shown him the way with their work in the Sixties but he was Britain's response. And he did us proud.

 

 

It's all so knowing. He's quite aware of what he's doing. The first and last tracks on the record are It's No Game Parts 1 & 2, but really it pretty much is. He's playing with us. Each song on the first side It's No Game, Up the Hill Backwards, Scary Monsters, Ashes to Ashes and Fashion comes on like a manifesto. It's all so self-referential and with a lesser artist might come across as a conceit but Bowie has earned it by now and knows that he has an audience who have been paying attention and will join the dots.

 

 

Side Two, in contrast is more impenetrable and harder work for the listener. The tunes aren't quite so flashy and the lyrics are more oblique but they reward repeated play. They make the record a denser more difficult piece of work. Bowie is still taking risks.  Teenage Wildlife kicks off like the riff of Heroes gone queasy after being left too long in the fridge. As for the lyrics, Gary Numan thinks it's about him and Ian McCulloch loves it and it's clearly to some degree critical comment on all of those young contemporaries of his dancing into the charts wearing his old cast offs. He's got a point but to some degree he has to sacrifice the impact of the song to cram in all the lines he wants to get out there.

 

'Same old thing in brand new drag
Comes sweeping into view, oh-ooh
As ugly as a teenage millionaire
Pretending
it's a whizz kid world
You'll take me aside, and say
"Well, David, what shall I do?
They wait for me in the hallway"
I'll say "Don't ask me, I don't know any hallways"
But they move in numbers and they've got me in a corner
I feel like a group of one, no-no
They can't do this to me
I'm not some piece
of teenage wildlife

Those midwives to history put on their bloody robes.'

 

Scream Like a Baby revisits dystopian, 1984 territory, themes Bowie had touched on before as is the case with much of the subject matter he focuses on across the record. With thirty years distance, none of these themes seem dated or the lyrics forced, they describe a world that's still recognisable, fascism, fashion, madness and the marketplace. Bowie understood what he was talking about and was now learning to sell it at less personal cost to himself. However, he was also now preparing to close this chapter of his life once and for all. He's never been as relevant since.

 

'Well I walked in the pouring rain.  And I heard a voice that cries .  "It's all in vain"'

 

Kingdom Come is a Tom Verlaine song about the daily grind and the difficulty of making your way through it but here it sounds like a Bowie one. The album to some degree is treading water now for a while. This feels like one more song is needed and Bowie didn't have a great one of his own so resorted to this. To me it's not as good as Verlaine's version particularly the one he used to play with Television, though Bowie as a better singer gets more emotional resonance across. 

 

'Psychodelicate girl - come out to play.  Little metal faced-boy. Don't stay away..... a million scars'

 

Because You're Young is more of the good stuff. Doomed romance. Bowie calling on his congregation. Youth at this point in time was pretty much what it was all about. Rock and Roll's main selling point. Bowie by now, his own youth retreating, could still churn out this stuff better than anyone else. Another day at the office. He's putting the album to bed.

 

'Silhouettes and shadows.  Watch the revolution. No more three steps to heaven.  Just walkie-talkie - heaven or hearth. Just big heads and drums - full speed and pagan. And it's no game.

 

Which bring us back to It's No Game. A lot of great albums finish up where they started from. It's a neat trick. Bowie has made it out of the Seventies and wants to have a sit down.  You get the sense that he knows the game is up. At least for him. He wants some money in his bank account and a quiet life. Who can say he hasn't earned it?

 

So, a great record. If a slightly sad one. The transition from one decade to the next was slightly sad in those days. I haven't mentioned all of the other contributors to its status, Tony Visconti, Robert Fripp and Carlos Alomar in particular. Those responsible for its artwork. Or generally how wonderful it all sounds. But after all it's a Bowie record. He took full writing credit for this one and it's mostly about him. The man who fell to earth.