The Gift Of Sound And Vision Article: 1980

A Melody Maker Scary Monsters Preview

Published in the UK on January 12, 1980, Melody Maker’s two-page article “Waiting For The Gift Of Sound And Vision” previewed David Bowie’s upcoming album *Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)*. The feature captured Bowie in transition — post-Berlin Trilogy, pre-*Scary Monsters* release — discussing the new sound, influences, and the anticipation of “Sound And Vision” as a key track. A pivotal 1980 Bowie press moment.

Article Overview

Publication Details

Magazine: Melody Maker (UK).

Date: January 12, 1980.

Format: Two-page feature article.

Article Text

Page 24 New Musical Express 12th January, 1980:

Waiting For The Gift Of Sound And Vision

T HE '70s were on their deathbed, slowly and sweetly slipping away from natural causes when they brought David Bowie in to say goodbye.

The parting ritual took place in different styles in different places; where I live it involved a few close friends, a bottle of Jack Daniel's and a small, indistinct black-and-white television set tuned to the Kenny Everett Video Show on Thames Television.

And there was Bowie in the last few minutes of the '70s, taking his farewell in a manner appropriate to one of the decade's most-travelled rock artists: with a new video of an old song.

When Bowie actually prepared this video version of 'Space Oddity', the prospect of using it as his formal farewell to the decade he had virtually dominated may not have been uppermost in his mind; but then in rock and roll, what a thing is has always come in a poor second to what it appears to be.

Similarly, the 'real' reason for Bowie's recent reliance on old material - the double 'John I'm Only Dancing' single with its 1972 promo visual, the updated audio-visual presentation of 'Space Oddity' that appeared on Kenny Everett's show and the similarly updated video of is purely academic.

Whether it is because of some writer's block, a contractual difficulty, or just plain laziness need not concern us. Suffice to say that the rock and roll decade ended with David Bowie and chalk the rest up to Jungian synchronicity. Therefore, we will discuss David Bowie, rock video and the ascent of gestural detail into shared mythology.

The rest of Everett's New Year's Eve show had been par: a few promotional videos of pop stars slotted into hi-tech goonery and antediluvian running jokes plus a couple of dance routines by the highly skilled and conscientiously risque dance troupe Hot Gossip. In its original incarnation The Kenny Everett Video Show had simply constructed elaborate framing devices for the video clips, now as befits a holiday special the frames had run riot and crowded out most of the pictures.

Promotional videos are fascinating simply because they give performers and their hirelings more opportunities to incriminate themselves than a simple musical recording, or even a straightforward filmed performance, could ever do. It probably took The Boomtown Rats' 'I Don't Like Mondays' fandango to make the point crystal clear to even one as obtuse as the present writer: the contest now is not just to make the best record, but the best video. Artists now not only have to be musically suss, but visually suss: the object of the exercise is to make a video that emphasises the key aspects of the record in question and demonstrates with clarity and vision exactly how the artists - or their employees - see the world and their place within it.

Preceding Bowie on that Everett show were others:

Bryan Ferry's Roxy Music - once considered to be Bowie's contemporaries and peers-weighed in with a desperately silly performance wherein Ferry, unintentionally self-cast as an ageing gigolo losing his looks, performed Wilson Pickett's 'In The Midnight Hour' surrounded by bored musicians and frenetic gogoettes in vinyl boots, so that's them in the dumper.

Hot Gossip were terribly shocking - oh yes! - with the same old lick: black male dancers acting terribly macho and white female dancers acting totally numb playing mildly sado-masochistic games in a manner almost as erotic as a general anaesthetic. Cliff Richard was on hand also, being 'one of the lads' by participating in a running gag with Everett in which he'd attempt to sing 'Travellin' Light' or 'Livin' Doll' and get ordered out eight bars in, but he also had his own video to do, so the miraculously spry and unwrinkled principal boy of the Festival Of Light appeared singing 'Devil Woman' (you know the one, it goes "Beware the devil woman, she's gonna get you from behind") clad in a tight black leather and vinyl outfit while a blonde model in a leopard-print leotard languished in a cage.

The exact same kind of soft-core bondage imagery favoured by Hot Gossip, in fact, but one presumes that the lack of bodily contact, the fact that no black persons were involved and the purifying presence of the Bible-thumping choirboy himself defused the somewhat suspect implications. The entire spectacle bore an unnerving similarity to Bowie's 'John I'm Only Dancing' video.

The grandmasters of modern video pop -The Boomtown Rats, in case you hadn't guessed - unveiled their newest spectacle in which they got to play at war movies to the accompaniment of 'Someone's Looking At You' (from 'The Fine Art Of Surfacing' and presumably also their new single). While the 'Mondays' clip was at least loosely based on

the idea of the artist 'performing' the song, this one was a development of an image connected so loosely with the song that sound and vision worked at total cross-purposes, distracting rather than reinforcing.

The actual send-off for 1980 was a live in-studio performance by The Greedies (the Pistols/Lizzy glee club) of their totally absurd Christmas single, but it was little more than a signal to this viewer that it was time to refill the glasses and cue up 'London Calling' at an anti-social volume, and the programme effectively ended with Bowie.

H E appeared, neat but haggard, lit to look vaguely psychotic in the manner currently popularised by David Byrne, strumming at a 12-string guitar and performing the opening section of 'Space Oddity': a sparse, ominous arrangement for piano, acoustic guitar and rhythm section that by some outside agency; a nasty, unnatural exhilaration.

For the choruses, he appeared in tacky, ugly drag, an impersonation of a drag queen rather than an impersonation of a woman. Each incarnation was tawdrier than the last, and

each time he advanced across a catwalk in crabbed, arthritic mimicry of a model's stylised walk, tearing off his wig and smearing his make-up in mute allusion to the horrific climax of Roman Polanski's excruciating, wrenching movie The Tenant. A twin allusion to this upsetting and neglected film seemed to be made both in the title of his current album 'Lodger' and in the cover pose, where a broken and disshevelled Bowie is seen on an operating table about to be subjected to major surgery after a near-mortal injury. Whether these allusions were intentional is - as previously stated - largely irrelevant. In the video age man a no deal with t'ings as they are. Man a deal with t'ings as they appear to be.

The end result was that Numan had a recalled nothing so much as the sound of John Lennon's 'Plastic Ono Band' album.

Suddenly he dropped the guitar and walked off-camera- for one crazy, swirling moment the possibility suggested itself that this might be another variant on the Cliff Richard gag -only to reappear continuing the song in a padded cell. From then on the performance oscillated between the cell and strange footage derived equally from Bowie's original 1969 video of the song and his performance in Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth, wherein Bowie-in space-cadet uniform - sat in a suburban kitchen while a housewife performed household duties and common. objects levitated crazily about the room. In this manner, the profound alienation already apparent when the song is taken at face value-astronaut leaves planet, reviews the situation, considers his options and decides to stay away escalates to new levels. We now have a man wishing that he was in a position to make a total withdrawal from life-as-we-know-it.

An appropriate image for the '70s, where most people's existence represents a trap-i.e. something to be escaped- and a more appropriate one still for Bowie, a man who has reinvented himself continually in a desperate, thrashing attempt to escape the confines of his own personality and when he ran out of selves -took the one he inhabited around the world in an attempt to lose himself somewhere in the Third World.

All such attempts are, of course, futile. Bowie cannot escape the trap. He is the trap. That's what he's been singing about for the last ten years.

From trying to escape into imagined futures or fractured visions of the present, he now moves to the past. Throughout the decade, 'old' Bowie records have periodically surfaced into the charts: "Space Oddity' and 'Life On Mars' (to name but two) have become hits long after their original release dates, as has 'John I'm Only Dancing' currently, while in '73 Bowie took a headlong dive into the '60s with 'Pin-Ups'.

Rock and roll has never quite come to terms with its past, and Bowie has ghosts to fight peculiar to his own nature. The spectre he battles currently is named Gary Numan.

Numan mimics Bowie in a manner expert in its grasp of detail and style, though artless and shallow in its scope. The exact shape, size and texture of Numan's frozen, aimless gesturing need not concern us here, but his success does: he sells far more records than Bowie does these days. This autumn, I found a stack of copies of Bowie's then-current single 'Mr DJ' remaindered out in Woolworths in Whitby, Yorkshire for the considerable sum of 25p. It was a fairly safe bet that it would have cost more to purchase a copy of Numan's 'Cars'.

The circumstances were hardly unique Bowie had, after all, been outsold by The Sweet during his supposed glam heyday but still noteworthy. The week that Gary Numan first made it onto Top Of The Pops with his promising then-newie 'Are "Friends" Electric?', Bowie was having a video shown to boost his rising 'Boys Keep Swinging. Numan performed his ditty from behind painted-on cheekbones, staring eyes, a bank of synths and lighting derived from that used by Bowie on his 1975 'Station To Station' tour. Bowie, for his part, had taken the all-boys- together nudge-nudgery of The Village People and tossed it into a maze of mirrors. You will, I trust, recall 'Boys Keep Swinging', a mock-jolly ode to the joys of Being A Chap. He performed the song in multiple roles, singing the verses as a kind of ghastly parody of John Travolta, dancing with manic desperation as if compelled to grin and cavort number one hit and went on to become a huge star, blah blah. Bowie's single died on its feet. The implications are obvious. Bowie's video startled, offended and upset people. With the peculiar depths of psychological nastiness of which Bowie is so spectacularly capable, he attacked the viewer's sense of self by appearing equally false when playing a 'man' or a 'woman' and by implication accusing male and female viewers alike of playing absurd and demeaning roles. He also made sure that no-one who had seen the video would ever hear the song again in any light other than that in which he had just presented it. This light was unpleasant, and by implication so was the record. Result: flopsies for David.

Of course, the joke was on Bowie. The video was intended as a promotional tool, a device to sell more product. In that respect, it failed dismally. Bowie literally handed large sections of his audience to Gary Numan on the proverbial, uh, plate.

Numan had, of course, assumed the mantle of Bowie's old gestures, tactics and noises. In gestural and mythological terms, he was more Bowie than Bowie was. So if Gary Numan is David Bowie, then who is David Bowie?

WHO is David Bowie? (ha ha ha). This is, of course, not my problem or, for that matter, yours (unless you are David Bowie, and if you want to be, you-can be. Don't fancy it myself much, though). We've got our own traps to worry about.

Bowie would be in a lot less trouble if he were a film director, which is what he wants to be, because that's where the action is, artwise. In the video age, writers only produce scripts, and musicians only soundtracks. Bowie is patently not an actor (though he pretended to be one for an unconscionably long time) and he wants to be a director in the same way rock artists have wanted to be novelists, poets, painters, diarists, flashers, aristocrats,

politicians, prophets, thugs, avengers, oracles, heroes (just for one day) or even other rock stars.

Thus the gestural detail of Bowie's earlier work becomes deposited into the collective account we hold at the Bank Of Shared Mythology, where it becomes freely available for any rocking citizen who has need of it to make a withdrawal at any time. It's all there, alongside Jagger's pout, Presley's curled lip, Townshend's levitating-foetus leap and windmilling arm (the latter gesture borrowed from Keith Richards so adroitly that Richards himself had to have the heist pointed out to him at a later date), The Beatles' song constructions, Rotten's sneer and stare, everything in Dury's 'Sweet Gene Vincent' as a shopping-list of his contributions, Berry's riff and duckwalk, Joe Strummer's belligerent bark, Sid Vicious' hairstyle and jacket... INPUT! INPUT! INPUT!

All recognition-codes, personal quirks of individual artists and performers, things done on the spur of the moment, techniques and totems evolved for a specific purpose, all embalmed and elevated. All the devices and trademarks are quite devoid of any significance other than that which we give them. De Niro was wrong: the motif ain't "This is this", but "This means this, this symbolises this, this can be interpreted as this..." Push this button, receive this emotional response... finally, it all comes down to how skilfully motifs are manipulated, whether the manipulation is/appears to be/is interpreted as being conscious or unconscious. It efficacity is its criterion.

Video gives rock and roll more buttons to push. It also means that rock chaps must learn to decipher and then codify a visual language which manipulates the mythology in the same way that their music does (and modifying or dismissing the mythology still means dealing with it). A new set of skills to master, therefore, a new set of reasons for doing so. Video won't kill the radio stars - and it isn't even sufficiently advanced to make comparisons with the fate of silent movie stars compar who couldn't hack it in the talkies more than just a matter for idle speculation - but it'll place a few new demands on them. They will have to ask themselves certain questions and then convince others of the answers. Among these questions: who are you? What are you? What are you singing about? Why? What world does your work inhabit? What is your role within this world? What is our role within your world? Are you telling us anything we need to know? Can you convince me to get a haircut or a jacket just like yours? Why should I buy your record? (If I like the video and don't happen to feel the need to invest in videodisc or-tape equipment, will owning the record mean that I can be reminded of the video whenever I wish to be so reminded?)

In this age of grand illusion, an artist's stylistic devices (or an audience's, for that matter) can persist far longer than the artist's need for them. Last Saturday I saw The Clash in Aylesbury, and they found themselves confronted by a 'punk' audience with an insatiable desire to jump up and down and spit at the stage. The Clash did as much as anybody to create this audience, yet the audience's needs could probably have been fulfilled far more easily by the U.K. Subs or some such combo who have evolved specifically to be spat at. Similarly, Bowie's audience clearly estimated his work to be worth no more than Gary Numan's.

Numan has clearly perceived Bowie in exactly the same terms as Bowie's audience did (Numan being himself a part of that audience, differentiated principally by the ability to put his perceptions into practice) and, as such, has a vision of what that audience wants which is far clearer than that of Bowie himself.

Similarly, The Clash's audience seems to be making demands of The Clash which would be far better served by any gang of thrashers perpetually rewriting The Clash's first album. The Clash have made their own withdrawals from The Bank Of Shared Mythology (Eddie Cochran, Mott The Hoople, Slade, in a way, Lee Perry) but what they have deposited may soon end up financing attempted coups against them. Pete Townshend has, of course, been wrestling with all this since Paul Weller was in short trousers and bully for him, while Keith Richards assumes that he will always have an audience and sees no reason why their concerns should ever be any of his business.

The Stones had their own little video back-a-ways with 'Respectable', where they fell through a wall and had a good giggle, but such games did not seem to suit them. Audiences may consider that they are tired of old gestures, but all they're tired of are the people performing these gestures. Rather, they would like to see the gestures performed by people nearer their own age and postal district (which is why so many of the old-time punk bands were compared at the time to the Stones and The Who. Are we twigging something here?)

Commerce is healthy at the Bank. Deposits and withdrawals seem to balance (roughly, at least) and since rock is a fairly persistent symptom of contemporary civilisation, it would appear that this music and attendant culture that a few of us find so fascinating is going to be along for the whole ride, however long that is.

N OT VERY long is the increasingly widespread prognosis and there seems very little that you, I or anybody in the rock industry or audience can do about it. The Four Wise Brudders from Queens told me just the other day: "This is the end, the end of the '70s/this is the end, the end of the century", and that is a message clear enough for even the most intelligent person to understand.

As governments and private citizens alike, all over the world, conspire to increase the per capita share of misery as much as is humanly possible, all we can ask of our entertainers is that they entertain us in a manner that fights back against everything that wishes to destroy us.

The '80s beckon like a black hole. Bowie may well lose himself in it, the way he's been trying to lose himself for years. Others face it, perhaps in disarray, perhaps falteringly, but they turn their faces towards the darkness and sing a song that means something. Everybody does what they can and demonstrates how much or how little they are capable of. Impotent or not, rock rages against the dying of the light.

Or maybe it's just another video scenario, just another image for the screen, another item for the shopping list. If that's the case, then there's nothing, really nothing to turn off.

Do you have this Melody Maker article in your archive? Waiting for the gift? Share in the comments!