— Vici MacDonald
When I was a boy, David Bowie was a part of rock royalty. He had songs like "Let's Dance" and "China Girl" which were huge hits and he strutted on stage at Live Aid with Mick Jagger doing "Dancing in the Street". He was also a giant concert draw and seemed cut from the very same cloth as Phil Collins, Dire Straits and Sting: middle class and older than conventional pop stars who appealed more to our mums than to us. Some of his songs were all right but did any of them matter with Culture Club and Duran Duran around? He was establishment and I had little inkling that he had a massive discography of extraordinary works put out during the decade of my birth. Nothing by the mid-eighties would indicate a musical genius, just a big star. Then he seemed to lose his way.
Jump ahead a decade and I am in university. I didn't care much for the frat rock of Hootie & The Blowfish and Blues Traveller, I was quickly growing bored of Britpop and I couldn't be bothered with the bulk of drum 'n' bass and hip hop. It was during this time that I started going back to earlier eras and genres. Miles Davis, The Beach Boys, Stevie Wonder. I began hearing about Bowie in the seventies and I decided to explore his music from that time. Friends of mine who were into music as deeply as I was, nodded as I told them all about Ziggy Stardust and Low but others didn't have much to say on the matter. "He was in Labyrinth, right?" was the common lay response.
This ignorance annoyed me at the time (no one would ever associate a movie star with a one-off pop hit — and, yes, I am aware that Dame David was in fact in several films) but it's understandable in light of Bowie's late-eighties' fall from grace. A superstar in '85, he had become obsolete within a couple years and was so desperate to revive his fortunes that he formed a sad hard rock group by the end of the decade just to kick himself back into gear. Loyal Bowie followers will tell you that he eventually did and it's with (insert-album-title-from-Black Tie White Noise-to-Black Star-here). The fact that few can agree just when he did finally have that long-awaited return to form kind of reveals a hidden truth: it never really happened.
But how did the man who spent fifteen years at the forefront of popular music suddenly come adrift? The run of singles stretching from 1969's "Space Oddity" through to "Let's Dance" in 1983 is simply unbeatable and he did some pretty great albums in that time too. But his desire with the latter to produce a balls-out hit single with Nile Rodgers producing and Stevie Ray Vaughan doing a memorable blues guitar spot proved to be his creative undoing. No longer was he leading the way nor was he cagily latching on to the hip new trend. "Blue Jean" from 1984 proved a big hit but for the first time in ages Bowie seemed content doing more of the same. Parent album Tonight was patchy and easily his weakest LP to date.
Following up a relative failure is never an easy task. Bowie chose to take some time off (a feature in Smash Hits from earlier in the year notes that he'd been doing some production work as well as "reading 18 books a week and sitting around his homes in Switzerland and Scotland") and appeared in both Absolute Beginners and the aforementioned Labyrinth. If not exactly idling away his time, he doesn't appear to have honed his own music during his layover, neither did he seem to be soaking up what others were up to. Returning with Never Let Me Down, he made a conscious decision to get back to rock music. He may as well have told everyone that he'd run out of ideas.
But Bowie being Bowie, it wasn't a complete waste. Most of the album is wretched but a couple tracks salvage things a bit. "Time Will Crawl" makes its case for consideration on the great-songs-from-duff-albums list (along with "This Is England" by The Clash and "Undercover of the Night" by The Rolling Stones) with a powerful vocal — a positive side-effect of Bowie's hands-off approach to his two previous albums was that it forced him to focus his energies on his singing and his range became fuller — and a pretty good tune that does, as Vici MacDonald points out, hark back to better days. Tellingly, however, she compares it to "something" from the Aladdin Sane album, which had been his first long player until Tonight to have been criticised for being too similar to its predecessor. Nevertheless, an eighties Bowie recapturing his seventies paradigm was welcome.
Yet, having Ziggy and Aladdin on the brain wasn't going to do him any favours. Good as "Time Will Crawl" is, it wouldn't possibly have made the cut for either of those albums (it might have been good enough for Diamond Dogs which admittedly isn't one of my favourites). By his reduced standards of the time, it's a perfectly fine record and it still holds up. And even though MacDonald makes a point of bringing up his legacy, it's possible that much of his fanbase had little concern for what he had done a decade and a half earlier. Indeed, considering sales of Never Let Me Down quickly faltered amidst poor reviews, they were similarly apathetic towards his current stuff too. Appropriately, "Time Will Crawl" would limp to a token top 40 position in Britain while missing the US Hot 100 entirely.
Though no classic, "Time Will Crawl" was the best he was capable of at that time. And like his other good singles to come (I'm particularly fond of "Jump They Say" and "Hello Spaceboy"), it simply relies on Bowie's innate grasp of pop in order to succeed. He wasn't able to lead the way any longer and the artists he championed — Pixies, Grandaddy, Arcade Fire — weren't able to light enough of a fire under him. His work from 1993 up until the end of his life was respectable but he would never return to his heyday — though, mercifully, he also never reached the nadir of the late-eighties. But the public would eventually come back around to him. Bowie's death in 2016 stunned music fans all over the world and there are many who seem to still be grieving. Not bad for someone who was once 'the guy from Labyrinth'.
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Also Reviewed This Fortnight
Terence Trent D'Arby: "Wishing Well"
More often than not, groups who everyone says sound like The Beatles actually sound nothing like The Beatles. They don't have that concise lightness and thrill of their early singles, nor the astounding inventiveness of their post-1965 work; in reality, all they have is three chords and a generic quality that isn't so much reminiscent of the Fab Four as just being vaguely similar to everything that has come since them. Kind of like MacDonald's view that "Wishing Well" sounds too much like Prince. Certainly the little perv's influence was everywhere at the time but perhaps more so in Britain than back in the States where white pop and rock music had yet to cotton on to his cool. With his chewy baritone alone, Terence Trent D'Arby marks himself out as well outside the Prince umbrella though the tune is decked out in those fussy details which were a trademark of the Purple One. An influence, sure but it doesn't feel like Prince is all over this thing. Either way, it's pretty damn brilliant, as I thought then and still maintain today. Poor, old Vic should have listened to Sylvia Patterson, who vainly tried to cajole her colleague into anointing it SOTF. Turns out, it was one of the singles of the year and a song that the future Sananda Maitreya would have difficulty topping.
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