Another thing about the late period is the ensemble singing. It’s often an orchestra of voices beautifully arranged, walls of harmony, call and response, octaves and unisons, left and right spread out, sometimes barely audible—you realize, wow, it must have taken ages to do all of that. What an interesting and insightful interview. I’ll look forward to the book! For the past eight years I have been the guitarist and transcriptionist / arranger for a touring Bowie tribute band called “BowieVision”. The excerpt of the solo from “I Can’t Give Everything Away” is one of my charts, and I’m delighted to see it included here. In transcribing (and essentially decoding) the structure of Bowie’s songs, I’ve discovered some repeated structures and idioms that make his music so entrancing. I wrote a long blog post about the chromatic movement in “Life on Mars?” a number of years ago. How music technology can make sound and music worlds accessible to student composers in Further Education colleges CO: It’s amazing how much of a through line Newton is for Bowie. I heard “Looking For Water” playing a while ago and thought “that’s another Newton song.” Is it strange how much he identified with the character?

Dr. Kardos’ point about Bowie camouflaging his compositional adventurousness with claims of non-musicianship is encapsulated by one anecdote Bowie related in, I think, the 1987 cover interview in Stone where he recounts suggesting a chord-structure for “Never Let Me Down” to Carlos Alomar and Alomar politely modifying it from something Bowie good-naturedly jokes would otherwise have been “ponderous and funereal,” his natural reflex. I think of “Dancing Out in Space” as an example of the ponderous-and-funereal tendencies in a pop love song fully unfurled, and I find it both catchy *and* haunting. Kardos, Leah(2014) Folio of compositions and critical commentary.(PhD thesis), The University of Queensland.Pierrot in Turquoise or The Looking Glass Murders 1970. Directed by Brian Mahoney. Scottish Television David Bowie in Lindsay Kemp’s production of Pierrot in Turquoise. Photograph: Scottish Television

One of Potter’s masterpieces, The Singing Detective (BBC, 1986) has Michael Gambon as a writer, Philip Marlow, recovering from a vicious bout of psoriatic arthritis in a hospital ward. The second episode is entitled “Heat.” Kardos’ book lists a number of fascinating parallels between Singing Detective and Bowie’s last works. However he also struggled with his confidence. I asked Tony about The Next Day: why did it take so long? He said it was his confidence. CO: Yes, all a bit Da Vinci Code. I do still love the Villa of Ormen Tumblr. 1 I love the unsolved mystery of that. That could have been him: it’s not out of speculation. CO: So, in your book, as this late period begins, another is winding down. You were a BowieNetter 2, and that era seems like such a contrast to the late years. In the late Nineties, he’s Accessible Bowie. He’s chatting with fans, having in-studio live feeds, doing interviews with anybody who claimed to be a journalist. It must have been a fun period for you—does it feel bizarre in retrospect?

Leah Kardos and ‘Blackstar Theory’: The Interview

The demoing comes into its own in the late period, the particularity of the choices that David makes tended to get translated. Tony bought his own Zoom unit so he could figure out how to work with it. Reportedly David would say things like ‘I like the way I did it [on the demo], I don’t see why I have to do it again.’ So the demoing is bleeding into the end results. LK: Tony is very keen to say whenever he has the opportunity that Bowie’s voice was brilliant to the end. And he was in the room, so who can argue. However in the Whatley Last Five Years documentary, when they isolate the ‘Lazarus’ vocal, you can hear how raspy he sounds. There’s a heavy frail grandeur to Bowie’s late voice that I spend a bit of time trying to frame in the book. Thankfully, another feature of the period is the consistently great vocal takes Tony manages to draw from him, so there’s a lot of musical examples to dig into. Lindsay Kemp’s 1970 televised version of Pierrot in Turquoise, for which Bowie sang “When I Live My Dream” and other compositions. Lots of dreams, mirrors, bedrooms, killings.

Cold Lazarus, episode 4 ‘Finale’ (1996) is available to watch on YouTube. The whole series of Cold Lazarus is available to stream on Channel 4 (online).

CO: We’ve talked before about his love of the Korg. 4 How best to describe how odd his affection for this keyboard was—while it’s not a kid’s keyboard, it’s no state of the art synthesizer either. Sketch of ‘somnambulist for Lazarus video’. 2016, David Bowie Is… V&A. Steve Schapiro portrait from 1975, and still from ‘Lazarus’ video Kardos, Leah(2012)How music technology can make sound and music worlds accessible to student composers in Further Education colleges. British Journal of Music Education, 29(2), pp. 143-151. ISSN (print) 0265-0517 The harmonic structure – and rhythmic architecture – of Bowie’s songs is often a message itself. There is deliberate disruption of symmetry with phrases in odd-numbered groups, and occasional time signature surprises. Have you ever noticed that the intro of “Fame” is in 3, but the song is in 4? In other songs there are some (arguably) diatonically nonfunctional chord movements, and yet those surprising inclusions don’t seem jarring or artificially “weird for weird’s sake”. Love is Lost (Hello Steve Reich Mix by James Murphy for the DFA – Edit)’ 2013. Directed David Bowie.