On January 8, 2017, David Bowie would have turned 70. A year after the death of the great musician, the BBC released a documentary dedicated to the most mysterious period of his life — the last five years, when he secretly recorded albums, staged a musical, and battled cancer. Medusa watched The Last Five Years and tells how Bowie returned to music — and why his last album, Blackstar, contrary to our perceptions of it, was not intended as a farewell.
Farewell to fame
In early interviews, David Bowie said that he did not intend to be a rock star forever: music and world fame were just a means for him to be able to do what he wanted. In reality, things turned out a little differently. Bowie ceased to be a public figure only in 2004, after a concert tour to promote the album Reality.
As the musicians who toured with Bowie in 2004 recount in a BBC2 documentary, those concerts seem to have been the happiest of his life. He enjoyed the songs and performances, fooling around while traveling from city to city (the film shows relevant archive footage: Bowie wearing flashing badges in the shape of musical instruments). Guitarist Gary Leonard notes that Bowie seemed to have decided to take off his mask — for the first time in all the time the musicians had known him, he became himself, both for them and for the audience. The tour ended on June 25, 2004, due to a heart attack that Bowie suffered right in the middle of a performance. Since then, the musician has not given any full-fledged concerts and has practically stopped appearing in public.
Bowie’s acquaintances say that he fundamentally revised his views on creativity and his own life — and distanced himself from music. Bowie practically stopped communicating with the musicians in his band, limiting himself to rare letters. Tony Visconti, producer of many of Bowie’s albums, admitted that after his heart attack and until about 2011, David was not interested in music at all; musician Peter Gabriel said the same thing.
Autobiography in music
In 2011, the musicians who had toured with Bowie on the Reality Tour received unexpected letters from David: he was interested in whether they were busy and whether they could participate in the recording of a new album. The only condition was strict secrecy: Bowie forbade anyone from talking about the new album and even made them sign non-disclosure agreements, something he had never done before in his life. Tony Visconti suggests in the documentary that Bowie was trying to escape the pressure of the music industry and release the album only when all the songs were perfected and completely finished.
The recording process was very different from how Bowie had worked on albums in the past. At exactly six o’clock in the evening — and sometimes even earlier — the musician would simply get up and leave, saying that he was done for the day. He often joked about his age and walked around the studio in slippers he had brought from home.
Not only was Bowie’s return to music unexpected, but so was the theme of his new album, The Next Day. Bowie is primarily known as an innovator who never looks back — but on this album, he turned to the past, both in his music and his lyrics. The song Where Are We Now is known to be dedicated to Berlin and the years Bowie spent in that city: as Visconti, a close friend of the musician and producer of more than a dozen of his albums, says, David had never indulged in nostalgia before. “I never thought he would look back. This is something new for him,” says Visconti.
The cover of The Next Day was also nostalgic. Bowie suggested to artist Jonathan Barnbrook that he use one of his concert photos from the 1970s as inspiration. After much deliberation, Barnbrook began to rework other legendary photographs of the musician and old album covers, covering parts of them with squares. As a result, one of Bowie’s most famous photographs, the cover photo for Heroes, in which the musician’s face is covered with a white square, ended up on The Next Day.
