The artist who fell to Earth - interview with singer David Bowie - Interview

Interview, Feb, 1997 by Ingrid Sischy

IS: You went so quickly from making Outside to making Earthling. It's phenomenal.

DB: It was the pure exuberance of having had such a fabulous year touring. We wanted to take that energy into the studio and capture it. We had no more manifesto than that. We wrote with a take-no-prisoners attitude. Really fast, really aggressively, and really simply. Often, record companies only like to release something every now and again because they want enough time to be able to sell through and market an album. An artist doesn't work like that. So I thought I'd slip this one in quick while the company wasn't looking. [laughs] It's a real exuberant album.

I read a really interesting piece on Prince recently. I empathize so much with what he said [about the way the music business works]. It's such a dollar-oriented market and such a dollar-oriented world, the world of rock. I envisage a time when the Internet will take up a lot of the slack. You could have a friendly dialogue with your company and say, "O.K., let me have that material and put it on the Internet. You don't want it, you're saying nobody else wants it, so let's just put it on the Internet and anybody who is interested can have access to it." And it can be free and you can just download it. I can see that happening as one way of letting people hear what you're doing.

IS: I want to ask about something that we've talked about a lot. There's always been this assumption that a human being can't be really conscious, deeply conscious, in a big way, in more than one medium. There's always an assumption that they're a tourist in the other ones. Now you and I have discussed the fallacy of that a lot. This time I want to ask you about how your immersion in film has influenced you as a performer.

DB: There are certain films that were fundamental to my understanding of what lighting can do, for instance. It wasn't what a film was about so much, or what they were saying, but how it was lit.

IS: Like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari?

DB: Year, Caligari. More particularly films by Fritz Lang, like Metropolis. Also maybe [F.W.] Murnau's Nosferatu - the playing with silhouette and shadow and how extraordinarily graphic a movement can become if it is only half lit. Things would become so imperial, when only lit with white light, but also so mythlike. When I started playing around with the idea of Ziggy [Stardust], who was a mythic character, it seemed so right for him. In fact [we didn't end up using that kind of lighting] until the middle '70s with the Thin White Duke, which was sort of fully German Expressionistic. In fact, we used to open up with Un Chien Andalou, by [Luis] Bunuel and Salvador Dali, as the support act. I could always tell when I was due onstage because I would hear this shriek come out from the audience when they would cut the eye. I thought to myself, "Oh, I've got fifteen minutes." [laughs] There was also a film called The Queen from about 1967 or 1968. The movie was a mesmerizing, mythic thing about drag queens and it went hand in hand with a book I was reading called City of Night, by John Rachy. In general back then there was a new vocabulary [evolving] out of what were truly extreme and interesting things. There was a real bonding of the arts happening. Things weren't just music or just theater. But now at the end of the century, I see it blossoming again. What's going on today is all about the realization that one art form can't be in isolation. It has to be informed by the rest of culture.