Old Boys Keep Swinging Article: 1997

David Bowie’s 50th Birthday Bash - Fifty in the Park one-page review in NME, January 25, 1997.

DAVID BOWIE (AND SHOWBIZ MATES)

Madison Square Garden

WRAPPED IN his Byronic robes of doom, the croaky old charlatan that is David Bowie uses this 50th birthday bash to piss away what remains of his career. Opening with the Lord's Prayer and ending with a Nazi salute, Dave tests the endurance of 20,000 assembled disciples with a medley of prog-metal noodling from his Tin Machine period and a silent

mime about feeling a tad alienated in Chinese-occupied Tibet. He then delivers a Burroughsian cut-up poem about space donkeys and explodes. Hurray!

That's what you want to hear, isn't it? A 50-year-old pantomime dame on the skids, making horrible music and murdering his classic hits? Not, say, an all-time original talent back in focus after years of false rebirths and howling blunders? Or even the godfather of art-rock extremity testing his mettle against several generations of his musical offspring, from Robert Smith to Dave Grohl? Or maybe that, for the first time in nearly two decades, Dave has new songs which can hold their own against his back catalogue in terms of starkly dramatic delivery and simple melodic power? Insane notions, of course. Unlikely beyond reason. Too much to dare hoping for. But all completely true.

Essentially, this mammoth benefit bash is a win-win situation for even the most disillusioned Bowie fan. If you've been patiently hanging on for Dave to make noises as savage and uncompromising as his '70s prime, then the gnashing industrial junglism of 'Little Wonder and "Battle For Britain' fit the bill perfectly. If you only want the classics, they're here- from 'Jean Genie' to 'Heroes" to 'Fashion' and beyond. And if you've given up on old Wonky Eyes altogether, you ridiculously youthful Bowie. Even younger guests like Sonic Youth seem slothful by comparison, slouching onstage to add superfluous art-punk guitar turbulence to the already ear-splitting newie Tm Afraid Of Americans'. Scoff all you like at Bowie's gargoyle axeman Reeves Gabrels, but he makes a bloody great knob-in-a-blender racket by merely pressing the 'Sonic Youth' pedal on his Arseblaster 9000 control panel, thereby rendering the Yoof's amateurish lo-fi scrongling instantly redundant. Arf. It all ends with Dave's solo strum through 'Space Oddity'. Inevitable, cheesy, predictable - but a slice of pop history and, yes dammit, quite a touching moment too. Next year he may well be back to rubbish big-haired metal again, of course. But right now, the case for a full-blown David Bowie revival has never looked stronger.

Stephen Dalton