Epilogue: Lazarus (2013-2016)

Our final episode on the life (or lives) of David Bowie begins and ends with a birthday. We start in 2013, when David reentered public life nearly a decade after his heart attack with the surprise release of “Where Are We Now," his first new song in a decade. It was one of the most stunning comebacks in music history. Most fans assumed that David had simply retired from the industry, content to live out the rest of his days as a father, husband, and anonymous New Yorker. Instead, he'd recorded an entire album of new material called 'The Next Day' entirely in secret. Even at age 66, he still had the power to shock. The story concludes with 'Blackstar.' Released the day David turned 69 in January of 2016, it’s an album that many believe was his parting gift as he faced down the illness that would claim his body two days later. Was this a knowing goodbye? We'll examine the evidence and conflicting theories. Intentional or not, it’s a fitting farewell — one that highlights David's creative daring and his absolute fearlessness.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Off the Record is a production of I Heart Radio.
Late in the evening of January seven, two thirteen, David
Bowie received an email from his producer Tony Visconti. Two
hours and thirty minutes to go, it read. David grinned

(00:23):
at the screen and fired off a quick response, Now
it's two hours and twenty six minutes. The old friends
were counting down the minutes to the release of David's
latest single, where Are We Now, his first new music
in a decade since his heart attack on stage at
a German festival in two thousand four, he'd effectively abandoned

(00:43):
his role as a public figure. That was the word
on the street at least, and David was happy to
keep it that way. His silence stoked rumors that his
days as a rock star were permanently behind him. There
were no tours, no albums, no songs, no major in
views for the latter half of the two thousands. David

(01:03):
Bowie was retired. Instead, he reverted back to David Jones,
a father, husband, and anonymous New Yorker. In just a
few hours, that would all change. Bowie was about to
make his comeback, though only a few people on the
planet knew it. He'd recorded a new album entirely in secret,

(01:25):
going to heroic lengths to keep it under wraps. It
was like something out of a spy movie. Code names
were employed, nondisclosure agreements ensure that David's skeleton crew kept
their mouths shut. Everything was on a need to know basis,
and consequently, very few people knew a thing. Not even
the head of David's label, Sony, was aware of David's

(01:46):
plans until just a few weeks before his big announcement. Naturally,
the exact was thrilled. A new Bowie album was always
cause for celebration. But what about the PR campaign, he asked.
Publicity pushes require months of prep work and strategizing. There
is no PR campaign. David replied, We're just going to

(02:06):
drop it on the eighth of January. That's it. The
countdown had commenced five four three two one. Where Are
We Now? Was quietly uploaded to iTunes. Just after midnight

(02:28):
in New York, a video for the melancholic Piano ballad
was added to YouTube with no fanfare. The only notice
was a small message on David's mostly dormant website. It
announced both the song and an upcoming album called The
Next Day, due out two months later in March. David
and Tony had their eyes glued to their computers for

(02:50):
a few minutes, nothing happened. Then the avalanche began. Message
boards melted down, Twitter went into overdrive, blogs blew up.
TV news programs treated the event like a musical second coming.
The shock was universal. There had been nothing from David
Bowie for years, and then boom, like the bolt of

(03:13):
lightning that had once graced his face, he was back.
Not only was he back, he had an entire album,
the announcement, the song, the art, the video, all without
a single leak, not even a hint to the world
at large. Remember this was almost a full year before
Beyonce's surprise album dropped. No one had seen anything like this.

(03:35):
It was like magic, as if he'd conjured everything out
of thin air instantaneously. There's no other way to say it.
David went viral. On one hand, it was a personal first.
On the other, he had been perfecting the art of
herality for nearly fifty years. Just look at his album covers,
TV appearances, videos, magazine interviews and fashion statements. Now, by

(04:00):
harnessing the infrastructure of the Internet that had been so
quick the champion David had crafted the perfect moment for
the era. The fame David had sung about in nine
had drastically altered by two thousand thirteen, mutated and magnified
exponentially through camera phones, social media, and the seven digital
news cycle. Celebrities were scrutinized like never before and stripped

(04:24):
of every ounce of privacy. The easiest defense was to
embrace it and share every detail of daily minutia. The
thought of hiding something huge like an album drop from fans,
not to mention getting away with it was unfathomable. In
David's early days, he'd been told to act like a star,

(04:47):
even though at the time he was just a nobody. Now,
actual stars were going out of their way to broadcast
their own normality, making themselves relatable and accessible, allowing people
to see themselves in Where's the Fun In that The
illusion was gone. It was antithetical the David's whole m O.

(05:07):
I always had a repulsive need to be something more
than human. He once said, I felt very puny as
a human. I thought, the hell with that. I want
to be superhuman. The surprise release of Where Are We
Now was both an act of rebellion and the declaration
that he was still superhuman. Stars were meant to project
an aura of otherness that transcended the every day. In

(05:31):
spite of this intrusive new world, David's mystique remained intact. Plus,
it was fun. How often does a global headline make
you smile? To top it off, it was David's birthday.
He was sixty six years old. Three years later, he'd
release more music on his birthday. This time he would

(05:55):
be his last. Hello and welcome to Off the Record,
the show that goes beyond the songs and into the
hearts and minds of rock's greatest legends. I'm your host,
Jordan Runtug. We've come to the end of our season
on the life, or rather lives of David Bowie. Today's

(06:19):
episode starts and ends with a birthday, a former pagan
ritual that has evolved over millennia into an annual celebration
of life. This seemed like an appropriate finale. We begin
in when David re entered public life after a lengthy
absence with Where Are We Now, his first new song
in a decade, and we'll end with Black Star, his

(06:42):
final album, released on his sixty ninth birthday in January
of It's a record that many believed was his parting
gift as he faced down the illness that would claim
his body two days later. Intentional or not, it's a
fitting goodbye, one that high lights his creative daring and
his fearless spirit. Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, Major Tom,

(07:10):
the Cracked Actor, a ladin Sane. David Bowie had many
guys is over the years, but for much of the
late two thousands in early he was mostly known as
a ghost. He was a fleeting apparition on the sidewalks
of Manhattan, his home for the majority of his adult life.
Bowie spottings usually took a moment to register because he

(07:33):
looked so aggressively normal, though common sense would suggest otherwise.
On some level, people expected him to stroll the Soho
streets dressed in a silver suit, orange hair and glad glitter. Instead,
he was a middle aged man in a taddy gray hoodie,
skinny jeans, and work boots. More often than not, he
was doing mundane things like grocery shopping at the corner store,

(07:57):
or struggling to hail a cab, or sweating it out
out at a local gym. He was so successful at
being low key that he mostly managed to evade the
dreaded paparazzi. On the rare occasions when he was snapped,
he had a tendency to slip the photographer the finger.
A true New Yorker, he'd stopped speaking to the press

(08:20):
and for a time stopped contacting his friends, including Tony Visconti,
prior to his heart attack on two thousand four is
Reality Tour. They planned to record not one, but three
new albums, including an electronic a side project sort of
a techno tin machine, but then the subject was dropped.

(08:40):
He gave up his share of the studio they rented.
He just wasn't interested in writing music anymore. He told
one friend that he didn't have anything to say. I
just need some downtime, he insisted. He was fed up
with the music industry and no longer wished to participate.
When a plaque was erected at London to honor the

(09:01):
site where the Ziggy Stardust covered was shot, David was
nowhere to be found. He turned down repeated request to
represent Queen and Country at the Olympics in London, where
he was asked to perform heroes. Even the blog on
his personal website went without update for years. While living
in Berlin. Decades earlier, David had told a friend, I

(09:23):
became a rock star. It's what I do, but it's
not my whole life. Clearly he retained the sentiment. In
the New millennium. Many would cite his heart attack as
the reason for his public retreat. Rumors circulated that David
was dreadfully ill, and news outlets had their ow bits
ready to roll. The Flaming Lips even released a song

(09:45):
inn called is David Bowie Dying? David's friends denied it,
claiming that he was planning a step back even before
his health scare. In the midst of the reality tour,
David told pianist Mike Garson at to this, I'm going
to just be a father and live a normal life.
Now that David was happily married to wife Aman and

(10:06):
raising young daughter Lexi, the cons of fame finally outweighed
the pros the scale and steadily tipping for years. In
the beginning, fame was a means to an end, away
to get the resources to create as he saw fit.
Simply put, fame was freedom these days, it was oppressive.

(10:28):
Aside from scoring prime concert tickets or a good table
at a restaurant, fame was, to use David's words, a
pain in the ass, so he opted out. In a sense.
His heart attack, relatively minor as far as courtiac matters go,
was like Bob Dylan's mythical motorcycle crash in nineteen sixty six,

(10:49):
after which he was barely seen in public for a
year and a half. The severity of the accident is debatable,
but it had given the sixties poet laureate an excuse
to stop rest and reassess and raised his family and
the serenity of the Catskill Mountains. David followed Dylan's lead,
purchasing a sixty two acre estate near the Upstate town

(11:10):
of Woodstock. He'd been captivated by what he called the
spirituality of the region while recording Heathen in two thousand one.
I love mountains, he once said. I'm a capricorn. I
was born to be gallivanting on a peak somewhere. When
I got up there, I flipped at how beautiful it is.
There's a barrenness and a sturdiness and the rugged terrain

(11:32):
that draws me Most of his time was spent in
his New York apartment building, a former chocolate factory on
Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan. His fifty square foot home
was packed with books, most purchased down the street from
McNally Jackson his favorite bookshop. It was history stuff, mainly

(11:56):
the favorite of middle aged men everywhere. David deva hour
and everything he could find on the topic, often finishing
a book a day. When he wasn't reading, he was
painting or making charcoal sketches, drawing inspiration from the mini
museum of modern art that filled his living room. He
wasn't precious about it. He'd fallen out of love with

(12:17):
one piece, a large metal sculpture, and he indulged his
daughter's childlike whims to beat it with a hammer. He
doated on his daughter, taking her for walks and proudly
attending her school functions. But he also liked his own company.
I've never actually been bored, he once said. Looking out
a window and watching people is quite enough to keep

(12:38):
me occupied for half an hour. His quiet existence left
him fulfilled in a way that rock stardom never had.
David's more of a home body than I am Imman
admitted at the time, at least I go to parties
once in a while. David's long nights were clearly over.
Once he called the front desk of his apartment comp

(13:00):
X to complain that his neighbor was blasting music too loud. Granted,
the neighbor in question was Courtney Love, but it was
nine am and she was listening to Fleet with Max
Rumors and a volume she claims was quite respectful. Relations
with other neighbors were warmer. Most remembered, David is very
polite and a pure gentleman. One day he got stuck

(13:23):
in the building's elevator. A teenaged boy who lived down
the hall tried to raise his spirits by singing, here
am I sitting in a tin can far above the
world down the elevator shaft. David saw the humor and
perked up. When he did leave the house. It was

(13:43):
often at dawn. He cherished as early morning strolls, relishing
what he once called the city's magical transfer of power
from the architectural to the human. Sometimes he'd get a
hearty yo bowie from a local, but more often than
not he was left alone. He frequented the dusty record
shops in Greenwich Village in search of rare vinyl. Fans

(14:06):
thumbing through the Bowie section were sometimes stunned the spot
the man himself across the aisle, just another great diver.
He was known to get presciutto di Parma sandwiches and
a bombologni at a neighborhood Italian grocery store. When he
wasn't feeling that, he got a chicken sandwich with watercrest
and tomatoes from Olives on Prince Street. The smell of

(14:27):
freshly baked chocolate chip cookies sent his sweet tooth into overdrive,
and he usually grabbed one of those two. He was
a regular at Cafe Reggio, an ancient coffee bar where
he could be seen sipping a cappuccino outside and writing
in his ever present notebook. Just up the street was
Washington Square Park, David's favorite place in the city, a

(14:48):
haven for generations of self proclaimed freaks. At one time.
You could have heard Woody Guthrie singing there, or Alan
Ginsberg read poetry. Just a few blocks away. It was
a Electric Ladies studios where he'd cut fame his first
American number one all those years before the song had
been a meditation on the shallowness of show business notoriety.

(15:11):
These days, he was happy to leave it all behind
his appreciation for art of all kinds and never wavered.
I love seeing new theater, he told one reporter who
managed to snag a brief quote. I love seeing new bands,
art shows, everything I get everywhere, very quietly, he added,
and never above fourteen Street, New York's official demarcation point

(15:36):
between the bohemian and the establishment. He caught art house
films at the Angelica Theater, sometimes sneaking in the multiple
movies if he felt like it. It's so easy, he'd marvel.
His norm core attire and newly gray hair eliminated the
need for any type of the skies. But to be
extra cautious, he sometimes carried around a Greek language newspaper

(15:58):
to convince passers by that he was just a Greek
tourist who happened to look an awful lot like David Bowie.
It worked like a charm. A friend of his, who
it should be noted, was not famous, once gushed at
length about an art exhibit he'd recently seen. The friend
urged David to go see it, before stopping himself Oh,
you can never go there, there's too many people. David

(16:21):
gave a sly smile and said, oh, you'd be surprised
the places I'm able to go. He was never reclusive,
a fact that spared him the sad fade of people
like Greta Garbow or J. D. Salinger, whose passion for
privacy had the unfortunate effect of drawing even more attention
to themselves. Instead, David hid in plain sight. He attended

(16:45):
charity gallas and fashion events with a man cutting a
dapper but silent figure as they walked the red carpet
arm in arm. In two thousand nine, he attended the
premiere for Moon, a feature film directed by his son Zoe,
now going by the more conventional name Duncan Jones. David
also gave a handful of performances, all one offs where

(17:08):
he's sang just two or three numbers. The first on
stage endeavor following his heart attack was at the Fashion
Rocks event in September of two thousand five. For reasons
known only to himself, he came dressed in a bandaged
arm and a black eye. He seemed uncharacteristically nervous as
he's sang life on Mars with just piano accompaniment. Perhaps

(17:30):
he was gun shy after the dramatic end of his
last show where he wound up in the hospital. He
chilled out later in the evening when he performed two
songs with one of his favorite new bands, Arcade Fire.
He must have enjoyed himself, because a week later he
climbed on stage at their Central Park gig to help
do a twosong encore. Then and may have two thousand six,

(17:52):
David paid tribute to Pink Floyd founder Sid Barrett by
joining the band's guitarist David Gilmore on stage in London
for two songs. In addition to being a formative musical influence,
Sid's abandonment of fame in favor of an elusive suburban
existence surely must have resonated with David. Six months later,
on November nine, two thousand and six, he did a

(18:15):
three song set at to Keep a Child Alive benefit
at New York's Hammerstein Ballroom. He played wild as the
Wind Fantastic Voyage and also changes as a duet with
Alicia Keys. There was brief talk of a proper comeback
show at a New York festival he was curating in
two thousand seven, but it ultimately came to nothing. I'm

(18:37):
not thinking of touring, he said in New York Times
profile of them on I'm comfortable he never would tour again.
David also kept busy with his acting, playing a series
of offbeat roles in the late two thousands. He took
the part of the iconoclastic inventor Nicola Tesla in two

(18:57):
thousand six Is the Prestige, but only after director Christopher
Nolan quite literally begged him to do it. He was
more willing to lend his services to a small budget
indie film called August. Like most everything else he did
these days, it was a passion project. He also voiced
a character for SpongeBob square Pants, Lexi's favorite cartoon, but

(19:20):
his most notorious role in this period was for Ricky Gervais.
David had become friends with the comedian after watching gervais
BBC sitcom The Office. He loved it so much that
he sent Ricky his version of a fan email. I watched,
I laughed, what do I do now? dB? Ricky was

(19:40):
a Bowie super fan and hadfortuitously just come home from
purchasing a fresh CD copy of a Laddin saying it
was kismut. As their relationship solidified, Ricky plucked up the
courage to ask David to be in his new series Extras.
Perverting his hero worship, he cast David as himself, but

(20:00):
an especially mean version. He meets Ricky's character, a hapless
dealist actor, and is inspired to write a song on
the spot called Stupid Little Fat Man. Ricky sent David
the suitably cruel lyrics he was to sing and asked
him to put his own tune to it. Something retro
cam Ricky's request, like a Life on Mars. Oh sure,

(20:22):
David replied, sarcastically, I'll just whip up a quick Life
on Mars for you. Huh. Ricky appreciated the absurdity of
the suggestion and they both burst in the laughter, but
David complied and the song is surprisingly catchy. The scene
is easily the funniest single moment in David's career, as
he leads a crowded pub through choruses of Little Fat

(20:44):
Man with a pug nosed face while Ricky's character looks
on mortified. He reprised the song on stage in May
of two thousand seven, when David introduced Ricky at Madison
Square Garden for his American stand up debut. This would
be technically David Bowie's last ever live performance. Many fans

(21:05):
conveniently forget this. Instead, they prefer to remember whose duet
with Alicia keys On changes David's unofficial theme tune as
his concert swan song. Dramatic, yes, profound, certainly, but there's
a certain degree of poetry. And David, clad in an
immaculate tux standing in the spotlight at somebody else's show

(21:27):
singing an acapella song about a chubby little loser, it's
a much more fun curtain call. Though he had abandoned
his own musical ventures, David provided the odd backing vocal
cameo for a number of artists. He passed on a
song by Coldplay, bluntly telling Chris Martin that he didn't

(21:49):
think it was any good, But he sang on tracks
by the likes of Scarlett Johansson and the Danish alt
rock group Cashmere. He particularly admired the Brooklyn band TV
on the radio and saying harmonies on their two thousand
six song Province. In the studio, he dispensed precious words
of wisdom to the younger musicians stay strange, he advised,

(22:11):
and don't bend to his closest friends. David seemed content
to live in rock and roll exile. Then, in the
fall of producer Tony Visconti, got the call, how would
you like to make some demos? David asked. Tony did
his best to hide his shock. He made it sound

(22:31):
so casual, but David's revelation was in the same league
as the Beatles deciding to get back together. It was
no use trying to determine why or what had changed. Obviously,
David finally felt he had something to say. Like early
sessions for Low in nine six, David wasn't sure if
these new songs would ever see the light of day.

(22:53):
To keep the pressure off, he decided to keep the
recording secret, allowing him creative freedom without speculation from fans
and the media, or from meddling record label executives. He
invited guitarist Jerry Leonard to the sessions with an email.
The subject line read stumb, an old Yiddish word meaning
stay quiet, keep it to yourself. David urged, don't tell

(23:16):
a soul. Though he undoubtedly trusted his friends, David sent
out non disclosure agreements just to be on the safe side.
Within days, David, Tony Jerry, and drummer Sterling Campbell were
in a tiny eight by eight dungeon of a rehearsal
room in New York's East Village. Quarters were cramped, and

(23:37):
the four men found themselves gasping for air as they
sketched out David's songs from a little four track recorder
he carried around. They met there every day for a week,
tweaking chord structures as David sang wordless melodies on top.
He prefaced each session by saying that it was all
experimental and might not go anywhere. Let's just get together

(23:57):
and make some music, he'd say. At the end of
the week, David took the tapes in his backpack and
disappeared for four months. Typical. By April, he was ready
to work again, though still under the cloak of top secrecy.
His commitment to privacy was tested before they had even
recorded a note. Owners of the studios he booked couldn't

(24:20):
keep their mouth shut for more than a day before
leaking the news to the press. David immediately canceled. Instead,
they switched the sessions to the Magic Shop, a studio
conveniently located just steps from David's Soho apartment behind unmarked
steel doors. The studio's presence on the busy city street
was much like David's own. If you weren't looking, you

(24:43):
didn't know it was there. Visconti visited the Magic Shop
prior to the booking to stress the importance of secrecy
for his anonymous V I P. Client. Even the studio's
owner was unaware of who the sessions berefore until David
walked in on May two than to begin recording. The
studios interns were always sent home for the day whenever

(25:05):
David held a session, and the in house staff was
reduced to just two. Everyone involved was required to sign
an n d A from the musicians and engineers all
the way to the guy who brought David's double mocky
auto coffee order from Lack Colombe down the street. Though
strict about his privacy, they had a sense of humor
about it all. But we became known as the Secret,

(25:28):
as in has the Secret come in Today. At the
end of each session, David would snatch the sheet music
off of every music stand with a comedic flourish before
dramatically locking them away in his briefcase as if they
were government files or nuclear reactor codes. Sessions continued sporadically

(25:48):
for the next two years. For comparison, Low had come
together and around two months, never before one of his
album has been so drawn out, gone with around the
clock recordings sessions that had characterized young Americans and station
the Station. Instead, they worked very humane hours in by
ten am and home in time for David to have

(26:09):
dinner with his family. Given the long gestation period, one
would think that David's cover would have been blown at
some point. There were a few close calls, like the
time the Canadian band Metric arrived at the Magic Shop
unannounced in the studio owner had to physically block the
door and tell them to come back later. Another time,

(26:29):
guitarist Earl Slick was outside the studio having a cigarette
when he noticed the cameraman's tripod across the street. Everyone
knew that Earl was one of David's go to guys,
and a shot of him outside of a studio down
the street from David's apartment was sure to raise some alarms.
He stubbed out the butt on the sidewalk and beat
a hasty retreat inside. David was able to keep things quiet,

(26:54):
mostly because his team was so small. Back in the
high flying main man days of the early seventies, his
entourage had been enormous, with dozens of people looking after him,
and that had ended in chaos and lawsuits. These days,
he managed himself with the help of just two people,
a business lawyer named Bill's is Black and his fiercely

(27:15):
devoted p A Coco Schwab. His label deal stipulated that
he didn't have an A and R rep supervising his work,
a move that's highly unique in the music world. As
a result, no one at Sony knew a thing about
the thirty odd tracks he'd amassed. No one anywhere new
a thing. During breaks in the sessions, Visconti would walk

(27:38):
the streets of New York, listening the rough edits of
their new songs and his headphones. On his strolls, he'd
passed people in Bowie t shirts, a fairly ubiquitous site
in downtown New York. He couldn't help but smile, boy,
he thought to himself, If you only knew what I
was listening to. David Bowie's new song where Are We Now?

(28:14):
And it's accompanying video were released in the early morning
of January eight, his sixty six birthday. A handful of
Bowie file journalists were primed that something interesting would be
landing in their inbox in the wee small hours, but
other than that, there was nothing in the way of
promotion or publicity. From both an artistic and a practical standpoint,

(28:37):
he didn't need it. The headline snowballed instantly. The single
became the top iTunes download by the end of the
day and would shortly hit number six on the UK charts,
his biggest hit in his home country since Absolute Beginners In.
David joked to his friend Bono that for once he
wasn't outshone by his birthday twin Elvis Presley. The message

(29:00):
on his website referenced this time away, David's the kind
of artist who writes and performs what he wants when
he wants it, read when he has something to say,
as opposed to something to sell. Throwing shadows and avoiding
the industry treadmill is ferry David Bowie on the surface

(29:23):
where are We Now? As a wistful remembrance of his
time in West Berlin, a city that both technically and
spiritually no longer exists. The passage of time is illustrated
by the fall of the Berlin Wall, evoking a vivid
before and after. David affects a weary croon frail with

(29:43):
age to name check his old haunts. In the song,
he wanders his former home, his one time clinic and sanctuary,
and he finds that it no longer resembles the place
he'd loved in the prime of his life. Had to
get the train from pot stammer Platts, he sings, you
never knew that I could do that. Indeed, this was

(30:05):
never something he could have done. In the seventies. A
busy transit hub prior to World War Two, pot stammer
Platte station stood abandoned during Bowie's Berlin era, caught in
the death strip between East and West that lay just
outside of Hansa's studios, where Bowie was hard at work
on Low and Heroes. The station reopened after the wall

(30:27):
came down, marking just one of the many ways that
Berlin had changed for the better. But the transformation gave
Bowie a twinge of melancholy as he mourned a pass
that was undoubtedly troubled, but still his own. On Where
Are We Now, David is a man in the twilight
of his life, singing of his lost youth and the
ghosts that he sees at every turn. Memories come flooding

(30:50):
back nights at the Jungle, a favored nightclub where he
would dance with iggy pop, and trips to the glamorous
Cadave department store, bike rise to the die Brucker Museum,
or breaking new musical ground at hans As Studios, cherished
moments for him that happened to be rock and roll myths.

(31:11):
To the rest of us, it was an irreplaceable, unmissable experience,
David once recalled of his years in Berlin and probably
the happiest time in my life up to that point.
The song is jarring for its nakedly nostalgic look at
David's own personal past. He was never known for being

(31:31):
overly sentimental or overly revealing. The words are almost as
much of a surprise as the Out of the Blue release.
Newly sixty six years old. He could be forgiven for
being a little maudlin in a sense it was expected,
But since when did David Bowie do anything that was
expected of him, perhaps doing the predictable. The type of

(31:53):
song that's appropriate for a man his age is the
most unexpected thing of all. The music video suggests it
might be a tease. Directed by Tony Ousler, it features
images of Bowie's Berlin stopping grounds, including his former apartment

(32:13):
in Schoonenberg. Housler's wife was cast in the clip due
to a resemblance to Coco Schwab David's Closest Confident in
the seventies. Their faces are projected onto a pair of conjoined,
misshapen dummies. Electronic effigies behind them. Footage of Bowie's past
flashes across a projection screen. The loft where they sit

(32:36):
is littered with junk, like a family basement or a
crowded attic. It's detritus of a life lived to the fullest.
The real Bowie appears at the end of the video,
standing off to the side, watching this puppet theater version
of his memories before him. Juxtaposed with the flesh and
blood Bowie, the dummies seem hopelessly hokey. It's performative in

(32:59):
the nostalgia, a conceptual performance piece acted out for our pleasure,
or is it in the video, the real David wears
a T shirt that reads Song of Norway, a reminder
of a very personal memory, one known by only a few.

(33:21):
It was David was dating his first love, a dancer
named Hermione Farthingale. They lived together and sang together. It
was the happiest he'd ever been. Then Harmony left home
to go abroad and film a small role in a
movie called The Song of Norway. She fell in love

(33:42):
with someone else on the set, and she ended her
relationship with David. It was a formative experience in his
young life, one that, by his own admission, messed him
up for years to come. The Song of Norway is
a summation of his earliest and deepest heartbreak and genuine
and personal grief, seen alongside the images of Berlin, his

(34:05):
very public past. David seems to be sending a message
with the shirt. You may think you know all about me,
but you'll never know how I felt, and you will
never know me. David never explained the video or the song.
He did no interviews for the release of Where Are
We Now or his new album The Next Day, which

(34:27):
was released a great acclaim in March, giving him his
first UK number one album in twenty years. One critic
described it as the greatest comeback album in rock and
roll history, and there are many who agree. But David
maintained his silence and the press for the rest of
his life. The closest he ever came as a request

(34:49):
from novelist Rick Moody, whose books David admired. Moody asked
for a list of words that hinted at the themes
of the album. David responded, but the list of forty
two three for each song. The ones for Where Are
We Now consist of interface, flitting, and mauer, the German
word for wall. As is so often the case with

(35:12):
David's art, the interpretation is up to you. Aside from that,
David turned down all requests for interviews. Instead, Tony Visconti
handled the press as best he could. He was emphatic
about David's strong health, a frequent topic of tabloid gossip

(35:34):
since his heart attack. He also went to great lengths
to stress that the downbeat, slightly mournful lead single wasn't
indicative of the rest of the album. Many of the
songs on the next day are up tempo tracks beefed
up by Earl slick and Jerry Leonard's crunchy lead guitar lines,
but the mood of the album is indeed dark. Valentine's

(35:55):
Day delivers a sobering message about gun control by referencing
a two thousand eight school shooting. I'd Rather Be High
ventures inside the mind of a seventeen year old soldier
fighting in the desert. The title track alludes to religious
tormentors and the hypocrisy of the church, and the album's
closer Heat was so bleak that Visconti requested an explanation.

(36:17):
It's not about me, David insisted. But the song The
Stars Are Out Tonight certainly contained the kernel of David's
personal experience with fame. In the song, he sings the
stars are never sleeping, dead ones and the living. For David,
there's no escape from the phenomenon that he once likened
to a very luxuriant mental hospital. The only time you're

(36:41):
let out, he said, is when you have to earn
money for just about everyone but yourself. The clever video
for The Stars Are Out Tonight subverts the notion of
celebrity by depicting David and co star Tilda Swindon as
ordinary folks. Who are hounded by famous people For all

(37:04):
the heavy themes, the next day was remembered as the
record where David Bowie faced his reputation. Nowhere is this
more obvious and the art that accompanied the album it
was the work of Jonathan Barnbrook, had previously designed the
artwork for Heathen and Reality. The single art for where
Are We Now took a shot of David performing in

(37:26):
and rotated in a D and eighty degrees, literally turning
his legacy on its head. The album went even further,
obscuring the iconic cover of Heroes with a white square
in the middle, on which the new title was written
in simple black lettering. It ingeniously played with the expectation
of David's history, which was always looming in the background

(37:48):
no matter what he did. Around the same time, David's
pass was put on display in a much more literal way.
Curators at the vict Tory and Albert Museum in London
had planned on doing an exhibition of artifacts that had
belonged to Elvis Presley. When the king's estate pulled out,
the organizers moved on to Elvis's birthday twin. Not only

(38:13):
was David interested, but he'd done most of their work
for them. Something of a pack rat by nature, he'd
saved everything, costumes, props, sketches, all lovingly preserved in boxes
and acid free tissue paper. He'd hired an archivist to
tend to his massive memorability collection, totaling some seventy five

(38:33):
thousand items from throughout his career, with new pieces being
purchased all the time from auction houses and private sellers,
David had cataloged his life. Perhaps he was hyper aware
of his own iconography, or he was just more sentimental
than most people gave him credit for. Though we distanced
himself from the exhibit publicly, David, one of the most

(38:55):
image conscious musicians of his generation, took an active interest
in how his life was being presented. His background and
the visual arts gave him an innate understanding of curation.
He appreciated their non linear approach the storytelling. Rather than
going chronologically, they organized the objects thematically, encapsulating the cities, people,

(39:17):
and artists that had shaped David's work. Tony Visconti created
a unique Bowie Mega mix from the master tapes of
more than sixty songs to serve as a soundtrack as
visitors floated through David's world. The only thing David refused
to land was his cream colored saxophone, the one he
wielded during his very first time on stage with the

(39:37):
Conrads at a Pta fair in ninety two. It was
just too precious to leave his care. The v n
A curators had low expectations for the exhibit they called
David Bowie Is, but it surpassed their wildest hopes when
it opened in March of two thousand thirteen, becoming the
fastest selling show in the museum's history. People were curious

(40:01):
to see what the fiercely guarded Bowie had in his closet.
After years without communicating with fans, David was eager to share.
David Bowie Is eventually traveled to a total of twelve
museums around the world, attracting some two million visitors. One
of them was David himself. He took him on and

(40:23):
Lexi soon after it opened in London, early one morning
before the crowds. The experience was powerful. It was like
he was dying and his life was flashing before his eyes.
Vintage TVs, artfully arranged on the gallery floor flickered with
images of his younger self performing There were the costumes,

(40:43):
of course, Curators cherry pick sixty out of the several
hundred available, displaying creations by Alexander McQueen, Vivian Westwood and
Kansai Yamamoto. But that was just the start. They had
the E. M. S. Briefcase synthesizer, the Brian Eno used
on the Berlin Trilogy. He'd given it to Bowie in

(41:04):
with a note look after it patch it up in
strange ways. It's surprising that it can still make noises
that nothing else can make. His beloved Oblique strategies cards
were also thrown in for good measure. There were other
gifts from famous friends. A doodle from John Lennon, sketched
while in the studio recording Fame inscribed for video Dave

(41:27):
with Love, a Western Union telefax from Elvis wishing him
luck on his nineteen seventy six tour. Attendees could trace
David's unshakable ambition, from hand drawn tor posters for early
bands like the Conrads and the Delta Lemons to elaborate
designs for the theatrical rock extravaganzas of the seventies. Then

(41:49):
there was the assorted grab bag of ephemera keys to
his Berlin apartment, the velvet underground test pressing that had
sent his musical mind into overdrive back in nineteen sixty six,
the coke spoon that had helped him through the Long
Diamond Dogs tour, a tissue blotted with David Ziggy era
lipstick displayed like a holy relic. A letter from formally

(42:13):
confirming his new stage name, David Bowie. The contents of
his existence were spread before him, arranged for public consumption.
His life had become art. The reflection continued in with
a new musical retrospective. It was the first to cover

(42:34):
his entire half century career, from David Jones to David Bowie.
The triple disc set featured three separate covers, each of
David at different periods in his life, staring into a mirror.
Though taken years apart, they're eerily similar enough to make
one wonder if you've been planning this for decades. The

(42:55):
first is his Ziggy Stardust incarnation, flame haired and freakishly
pay all almost translucent. The next is the thin white Duke,
dapper as ever in a suit in fedora, and finally
the current Bowie, a handsome, if nondescript man in late
middle age shot from behind. His face is almost completely

(43:16):
out of frame, as if a man in retreat. All
three covers bear the title nothing has Changed. Of course,
the images tell a different story. Comparing as many selves,
they could all be totally different people. The only giveaway
or is mismatched eyes, a permanent reminder of the teenage

(43:38):
tussle he'd had with his best friend all those years ago.
Before there was ever a David Bowie, there were those
eyes destined to become his trademark feature. The duality was striking,
one steely, blue and strong, constantly scanning the horizon for
what's to come, the other black and moody, damaged, looking

(44:00):
inward at the equally dark places in his soul. The
two perspectives formed a singular creative vision which led him
the fame and fortune over the years. The face that
had stared back at him in the mirror had changed
radically through makeup, hair, clothes, and just the ravages of time,
but those eyes remained constant. The title and art for

(44:26):
Nothing Has Changed was a challenge to all who labeled
David and attention seeking, changeling, or even worse, a musical chameleon.
After all, a chameleon is a creature who changes to
fit in with its surroundings. David never made any effort
to fit in anywhere. With its provocative name, nothing has

(44:47):
changed dared listeners to look closer and find the common
thread in his wildly diverse work. The tracks went in
reverse order, from his newest song all the way back
to ninet Isaza Jane, the first recording he ever released.
In a sense, it was full circle. The new song

(45:07):
he recorded for the compilation Bear's the same jazz influence
as he soaked up in the early sixties with the
unwieldy name Sue or in the Season of Crime. The
song was recorded with jazz composer Maria Schneider. David had
seen her perform with her big band at Birdland, Manhattan's
legendary jazz haunt. Together, they worked on an arrangement for

(45:30):
his new song, with its lyrics inspired by a seventeenth
century john Ford play called Tis a Pity She's a Whore.
As they bonded over their shared love of players like
Gil Evans and Stan Kenton, Maria recommended David check out
the quartet led by the sax player in her orchestra
Donnie mccastling. The group had a regular gig at fifty

(45:52):
five Bar, a Granwich village hole in the wall. David
dropped by to catch their set in June. Entering dank
downstairs bar, he was transported back to the Soho clubs
he frequented with his half brother Terry. As a team,
it was like a homecoming. The wild howl of mccastl
and Sacks reminded him of his passion for John Coltrane

(46:14):
and Jerry mulligan. As a student at Bromley Tech, a
guidance counselor had asked David what he wanted to be
when he grew up. David had responded, without hesitation, I
want to be a sax player in a modern jazz quartet.
Somewhere along the way, his gold been derailed by rock
and roll, but mccastlan and his band, these guys had it. Mccastlan, meanwhile,

(46:40):
was keenly aware that a living legend was sitting just
steps away in the tiny bar watching him play. No pressure,
he channeled his nervous energy and it went unusually intense performance,
and it didn't go unnoticed. David approached him afterwards. And
said with genuine admiration, Wow, that was really loud. He

(47:02):
stayed in touch with McCastle, and after the recording session
for Sue emailing him new demos and song fragments to
go over with his band. Amusingly, mccastlan was unfamiliar with
the majority of David's work. His only real frame of
reference was Let's Dance, and that was simply due to
its ubiquity back in the eighties. He offered to do

(47:23):
a deep dive in the Bowie's extensive back catalog, but
David talked him out of it. That's old stuff, he said,
I'm into different things now. Plans were set in place
to record a new album with Donnie mccastlan's group. A
day before sessions were due to begin in January of
David called Tony Visconti to a meeting. Oh, thought Tony,

(47:46):
this sounds ominous. He wondered if he was about to
get fired. David greeted his old friends before saying I
have something to show you. Then he removed his wool cap.
He was complete lee bald, and his eyebrows were gone.
I have cancer, he told Tony. He just come from

(48:07):
a chemotherapy session. Tony got terry. David told him not
to cry, and then the matter was dropped. Instead, they
discussed the recording planned for the next day. David had
more than he wanted to say. It was late one

(48:39):
night in David Bowie was in the midst of his
outside tour, criss crossing the United States by bus. Most
of the entourage was asleep, but David was wide awake.
He sat down with pianist Mike Garson, a veteran of
the Ziggy Star Dust shows. Garson had been with David
longer than any other musician. He was a valued collaborator

(49:02):
and trusted friend. They started talking one of those expansive
conversations that you have at one am. David had something
he wanted to get off his chest. Years earlier, he'd
seen a psychic and the reading had been disturbing. They
had told him that David would die at age sixty
nine or seventy. Though the meeting had occurred nearly a

(49:26):
decade prior, he'd never forgotten it and it nagged at him.
David was diagnosed with liver cancer in mid when he
was sixty seven. Though he certainly fought with strength and bravery.
The question of fate must have weighed heavily on his mind.
The chemo treatments were grueling. Sometimes he would call Tony

(49:49):
Visconti obstensively to talk shop, but also for some reassurance.
Don't worry. The producer insisted, you're going to live one hopes.
David reply in a voice barely above a whisper. Don't
get too excited about that. Few outside David's innermost circle
knew about his illness. Like the sessions for the next day,

(50:11):
the information was shared on a need to know basis. Consequently,
if you did, he threw himself into his work. It
was the best bomb to take his mind off the
painful treatment and the psychics unsettling prediction. In the early months,
he settled in at the Magic Shop Studios along with

(50:34):
Visconti and Donnie mccastlan's quartet. They drew inspiration from d'angelo's
long awaited comeback album, Black Messiah, which had just been
released a few months earlier. A little later, they dove
into Kendrick Lamar's Wrap Opus to Pimp a Butterfly. The
respective R and B and hip hop leanings of both
were shot through with traces of jazz. It was a

(50:56):
technique David would try to emulate on his new record.
Avoid Rock and roll became the familiar refrain of the
sessions as David turned his ear to other influences like
experimental rap, trio death grips and electronic duo Boards of Canada.
The recordings were split into roughly a week a month
throughout the spring of The free flowing creative spirit was

(51:19):
established on the first day when David told the group
just go have fun. Anything you're hearing, I want you
to go for it. Despite his health, his energy was high.
David's eyes sparkled and he belted it on the mic
like he was on stage at Wembley. His assistants dog Muffin,
became something of a mascot for the sessions and always

(51:41):
brought a smile to David's face. He and the band
we'd eat sandwiches for lunch in the studio lounge, and
they celebrated his birthday together when a mon stopped by
was sushi. He was sixty eight years old. The unnerving
countdown in David's head ticked on. Mortality had been a
recurring theme in his music in recent years, but the

(52:03):
words for this work in progress understandably cut a little deeper.
The tone was obvious enough for Tony Visconti to approach
David early on in the sessions You Can Eat Bastard.
He said, you're writing a farewell album, aren't you. David
didn't confirm or deny, he just laughed. By midyear, his

(52:24):
prognosis looked good. He was responding well to the chemotherapy,
and his cancer went into remission. David was cautiously optimistic, Well,
don't celebrate too quickly. We'll see how it goes. By
any metric, David Bowie had sampled more of life than
anyone could ever hope to. Iman once said, I'd like

(52:46):
to think there's nothing he hasn't seen. But there was
one sizeable item the cross off his bucket list, a musical.
He dreamed of writing one since he was a teenager
aping Anthony Newley's Stagey Crew, and he'd been not so
suddenly hinting at this ambition for years, and it influenced
nearly everything he did, from his ziggy stardust alter ego

(53:09):
to the over the top stage productions of the Glass
Spider Tour. His album One Outside had been a sort
of radio drama with songs and narration. Heck, the elaborately
staged and choreographed Diamond Dogs Tour had originally been intended
as a Broadway style version of George Orwell. David had

(53:30):
danced around the idea of a musical for his entire career,
and now he was ready to go for it. He
called Robert Fox, a theater producer he'd known for decades,
to try to figure out how to get the ball rolling.
He told Fox that he wanted to write a musical
based on Walter Tevis's book The Man Who Fell to Earth.

(53:51):
David had starred in director Nick rogueventy six film adaptation,
playing the role of the stranded alien known on Earth
as to Almost Jerome Newton. Filmed in the midst of
David's personal native in Los Angeles, the character had remained
with him for months. Newton's loneliness and isolation informed the stark,
emotional soundscapes of Low and Heroes. David's songs fit Newton's

(54:17):
voice perfectly in a way he never fully shook Thomas
Jerome Newton. They were psychically bonded. Acting as producer, Fox
hired Irish playwright and the Walsh and avant garde theater
director Ivo van Hove. Van Hove was a Bowie fanatic,
but he had some scheduling issues. Bowie begged him to

(54:38):
change his plans. We have to make it now, it
has to happen. His urgency made Van Hove reconsider and
workshops went ahead as planned. In New York, the play
was called Lazarus, named for a new song David had
written that was included in the production. It's sort of
an enigmatic sequel to the Man Who Fell to Earth.

(55:00):
The obtuse plot centers around the older Newton hold up
in his apartment, dulling the pain of his heartbreak with
cheap gin. He calls himself a dying man who can't die.
Then he meets another lost soul, a thirteen year old
girl who revives his corroded spirit and gives him hope
that he can return home. Ultimately, she sets him free.

(55:25):
If the David Bowie Is exhibition allowed David to see
his life from an audience's perspective, then Lazarus, with his
existential themes and its use of his back catalog of songs,
allowed David to see his soul on display. Autobiographical details
pop up frequently. At one point, Newton imagines visiting occupied Berlin.

(55:48):
One character in the show describes Newton as quote, sort
of sad, sort of unknowable in the way that you
imagine reclusive, rich, eccentric men to be. They might as
well be describing David. It's no coincidence that the little
girl in the show is the same age that David's daughter,
Lexi was when he co wrote it. Casting began in

(56:09):
the fall of Robert Fox flew to New York for
a preliminary meeting, expecting to see David. Instead, he found
David's business manager waiting with an open laptop. David spoke
to Fox through Skype and informed him of his condition.
Because of his illness, he would have to miss some rehearsals,

(56:30):
but his commitment to the project was total. He enjoyed
the surreal experience of hearing other people sing his songs
to him. He was especially taken with co star Christa
Miliati's anguished version of Changes. When he first heard it,
David turned to the producers and gasped, I'm so glad
I wrote that song. They would describe his face during

(56:52):
rehearsals as that of a delighted and amazed child seeing
something brought to life that was unexpected and joyful. With
actor Michael C. Halls the lead, the show went from
the planning stages to opening its limited run at the
New York Theater Workshop in just twelve months, warp speed
as far as musicals are concerned. When David dropped by rehearsals,

(57:14):
he was heard to mother and more than one occasion,
I'd really like to see this. The producers understood the
gravity of these words and acted accordingly. They got it done.
Tickets to the entire run of Lazarus sold out within hours.

(57:36):
David wasn't well enough to attend the previews, but he
was there for opening night on December seven. The show
was part sci fi drama, part rock spectacle, and part
video art installation. Its dialogue was kept short, elliptical, opaque,
and at times disorienting. The ending Bowie co wrote is

(57:57):
hopeful but typically open ended. Newton and his Muse sing
a poignant version of Heroes Bowie's celebration of the little
triumphs that comprised daily survival. It's arranged as a delicate
piano ballad. As it concludes, Newton lays on the floor.
On the video screen behind him, his ghostly image blasts

(58:19):
off on a rocket ship. It's unclear whether it's death
or an escape from Earth, a place where he never
truly felt at home. Perhaps it's both. David took the
stage at curtain call, beaming and his T shirt and
blazer at a dearly held dream had come true. The

(58:40):
press noted how Grady looked. They hadn't caught on about
his health. Almost no one knew a thing, but it
was clear to the cast and crew that he was struggling.
After his bows, he collapsed backstage. He was too sick
to make it to the after party. But even in
his weekends eight he told director Ivo van Hove about

(59:02):
plans to start a second musical. Van Hove was thrilled
at the prospect, yet he couldn't shake the sense that
he would never see David again. David then left the theater,
running the gauntlet of fans and photographers one more time.
David Bowie had just taken his final bow. It was
his last public appearance. From then on, he would communicate

(59:26):
with fans only through his music. That fall, he released
the first track from his sessions with Donnie mccastlan's group.
It was called Black Star. The multipart suite is an
uncategorizable blend of free jazz, atonal, Gregorian chants, and house
influenced rhythms. At just under ten minutes, it's as long

(59:48):
as song since Station the Station. That track had been
the definitive document of his descend into hell forty years earlier.
Black Star has more of an upward trajectory. It opens
with an ominous drone. The sparse melody on spools as
Bowie duets with himself to liturgical voices, intoning the words

(01:00:10):
like a Byzantine mass or a spell in the villa
of our men burns a solitary candle. He sings a
fragile beacon of hope amid the darkness, or a humble
memorial to a soul who was dead or dying. The
overtones become even more unsettling with references to the day

(01:00:31):
of execution. At the center of it all, he sings
at the center of it all lines that echo notorious
Satanist Alistair Crowley, a frequent Bowie muse. Suddenly, it's unclear
whether this is a sacred rite or an occult ritual.
David had engaged in the supernatural extensively during his spiritual
crisis in the mid seventies, when he was driven to

(01:00:53):
the brink of standard consciousness by self induced insanity. Now
on the threshold of life and death, the constructs of
day to day humanity were again melting away, and he
contemplated those same themes again. But then the music changes direction,
elevating listeners above the clouds with a piece that can

(01:01:15):
only be described as heavenly. A different Bowie is there
to greet us, singing earnestly and plaintively. Something happened on
the day he died. Spirit rose a meter and stepped aside.
Somebody else took his place and bravely cried, I'm a
black star. I'm a black star. He repeats the refrain

(01:01:38):
again and again. I'm not a film star, he asserts.
I'm not a pop star. I'm not a Marvel star,
I'm not a flamstar. I'm not a gangster. I'm a
black star. In the months and years that followed, fans
and critics would debate the meaning of David's personal rose bud.

(01:02:00):
Most obviously, it follows his lifelong fascination with space, an
extraterrestrial phenomena. In theoretical physics, a black star is a
more recent tangent of a black hole. It's a collapsing
star that's close to reaching singularity and space time ceases
to exist within it. The star has died, yet it

(01:02:21):
still releases its energy, and definitely, in short, it's interstellar immortality.
Of course, the title would inspire a host of other interpretations.
Most intriguing is a connection to Elvis Presley. The two
had a strange kind of synchronicity. They had shared a birthday,

(01:02:42):
a long time record label, and musical infamy. In nineteen sixty,
Pressley had recorded a song called black Star, which featured
the lyrics every man has a black star, a black
star over his shoulder, and when a man sees his
black star are he knows his time has come. The

(01:03:04):
track would go unreleased until the nineties. It's certainly possible
that David was inspired by his fellow Capricorn. He was
a fan, after all, and apparently wrote his song Golden
Years as an offering to the King, but it seems
unlikely that Bowie wrote black Star as a response to
an extremely obscure Pressley cut. There's also a persistent belief

(01:03:27):
that the song title was an oblique reference to his illness.
A black star is indeed a radiologic term for a
type of cancer lesion, but for breast cancer, not the
type David battled. Other black Star theories pushed the bounds
of believability to their breaking point. It's named after a
secret government space plane program, or David's friend most Deaf's

(01:03:50):
hip hop group, or a Greek anarchist terrorist organization, or
even an episode of the British drama Peaky Blinders, a
show David was no to love. The last theory is
pretty laughable, but the song did actually have its genesis
and a TV program. Filmmaker Johann Rennick was directing a
six part crime series called The Last Panthers and approach

(01:04:14):
Bowie to do a theme tune. It was a total
long shot, but to his surprise, David said yes. The
result was an early version of black Star, which was
reworked for David's album. When it came time to make
a video for the song, it seemed only right that
David asked Rennick. The pair worked together, with the director

(01:04:34):
going off a series of David's sketches and rough storyboards.
David appears in much of the short film as a
figure they nicknamed button Eyes due to his white blindfold
like a man as he sings on the day of execution,
awaiting death. The video opens with a solar eclipse and

(01:04:55):
an astronaut lying dead on a desolate landscape. His helmet
opens to reveal a jewel encrusted skull. Later, a skeleton
belonging to the doomed space man floats into the ether.
Though Bowie never said definitively the identity of the astronaut
was cleared to Rennick it was Major Tom, back for

(01:05:16):
one final appearance. Unlike his other creations, David retained a
special fundness for him. Since his debut in nineteen sixty nine,
Major Tom became David's only true recurring character, cropping up
and not only Space Oddity, but Nighties, Ashes to Ashes,
and a remix of Hello, Space Boy. In more than

(01:05:40):
just his first introduction to the public, he'd become a
sort of totem for David. The persona had taken him
higher and further than he'd ever dreamed. For all of
his fascination with space, David would tellingly admit that the
notion of space flight terrified him. I wouldn't dream of
getting on a spaceship. He once said, you'd scare the

(01:06:01):
hell out of me. Major Tom helped give him courage
to go where he didn't dare as an ordinary man.
In Black Star, Major Tom has finally come home, but
by symbolically killing him off, David was killing a part
of himself. The album Black Star was slated for release

(01:06:21):
in October, but production delays on the music videos meant
that the record hit shelves on January David sixty nine birthday.
Two days later. The psychic would be proven right and
Black Star would be consecrated as David Bowie's last record.

(01:06:42):
It's a distinction that would forever color and possibly distort
the songs that contained. Black Star has earned a reputation
as David's knowing goodbye to his fans, a parting gift.
In Tony Visconti's words, it isn't hard to see why.
There are two many clues to make an amiric coincidence.

(01:07:03):
Even the cover has a distinctly funereal air. It bore
a simple black star with astral fragments that, with a
little imagination, spell out Bowie, if you weren't looking, you
wouldn't even know he was there. Borne out of discussions
about black holes, the Big Bang, and the end of
the universe, Jonathan Barnbrook's design evoked mortality. The vinyl edition

(01:07:27):
had the star cut out of the sleeve, leaving the
record exposed, allowing it to degrade over time, another comment
on life's tendency to damage and wound. A morbid streak
certainly ran through most of the songs, including the title track.
A rerecorded version of Sue contains lines such as the

(01:07:47):
clinic call the X rays fine and references to tombstones
and graves. On dollar Days, he considers his successes and
his failures, weighing them both as he contemplates the afterlife,
which appears as the English evergreens of his homeland. Ultimately,
these are poetic liberties, taken with his lyrics, words that

(01:08:08):
David never lived to explain, and probably wouldn't even if
he had, But there's little need for interpretation. On Lazarus,
the last single David released in his lifetime, the facts
are potent on their own. It takes its name from
Lazarus of Bethany, a biblical figure that Jesus resurrects four
days after his burial. The sickness will not end in death,

(01:08:32):
Christ tells his followers. David wrote the song shortly after
his cancer diagnosis. It's difficult to read the message as
anything other than a dying man yearning for immortality, just
one more rebirth. The opening lines are arresting. Look up here,

(01:08:54):
I'm in heaven, David sings, as if speaking from beyond
the grave. I've got scars that can't be seen. He
punctuates the lines with furious slashes on a stratocaster given
to him by his old friend and rival, Mark Boland.
He received it the last time they met, just weeks
before his fatal car crash at age. The instrument had

(01:09:19):
becomes something of a talisman for his fallen musical brother,
and perhaps a monument to David's own endurance and survival.
I've got drama can't be stolen, he continues. Everybody knows
me now. His work, never lacking at theatricality, will live on,
and no one can take that away. This way or

(01:09:42):
no way. You know. I'll be free, just like that bluebird.
I'll be free, he concludes. The image evokes a poem
by Charles Bukowski, a favorite of Boys who described his
inner life, his privateself as his bluebird, one that he
struggles to protect from the gaze of the unforgiving modern world.

(01:10:05):
The long fade ends with a sax's howl, sounding uncannily
like a human voice, expressing wordless sounds of raw grief.
The music video brims with macab images. It opens with
David writhing in a hospital bed. Some of the pain
was undoubtedly real. To give the appearance of levitation, the

(01:10:28):
bed was suspended from the ceiling. The disorienting angle makes
his feverish malaise palpable. The scene is made all the
more distressing by the metal button eyes on the blindfold
that he claws in agony. Ancient Greeks would place coins
on the eyes of dead bodies as payment for Karen
the fairyman to carry the soul of the deceased across

(01:10:50):
the river sticks to the underworld. The symbolism that, perhaps unintentional,
is eerie. David works madly, wearing an outfit he wore
forty years earlier as the thin white Duke. He looks
fearful and frightened as he hurriedly scribbles, trying to finish
his work before running out of time. Then he stalks

(01:11:12):
off to a large wardrobe, climbs inside, and slams the
door like the lid of a coffin, and then he's gone.
It's tempting to interpret all this as a meticulously stage
managed goodbye, the dramatic exit befitting the greatest thespian rock

(01:11:34):
and roll has ever known. It's comforting to think that
David Bowie knew something about the universe that the rest
of us do not, and was able to plot the
precise manner of his final bow. But that wouldn't be
entirely accurate. Besides, do you really want to remember him
as a man cowed by fate who willingly submitted to

(01:11:54):
the inevitable and went down without a fight, not a chance.
As Black Star was ready to release that winter, he
was eagerly talking to Donnie mccastling about playing a series
of intimate dates at some New York jazz clubs, and
he was still plugging away at that second musical. I
can't stop it, he emailed a friend. It's coming full

(01:12:16):
force and I'm just creating and creating and creating. In
the last week of his life, he faced times Tony
Visconti to tell him he'd recorded demos for five new
songs and wanted to get moving on a sequel to
Black Star. Immediately, Visconti was thrilled, but then that was
the last he heard from him. The tone of David's

(01:12:38):
communications started to change. Old friends and partners began receiving
emails that one described as slushy. In his final days,
he sent a message to Brian Eno, thank you for
our good times. Brian. He concluded they will never rot.
He signed the message Dawn, just to keep it from

(01:12:59):
getting too serious. This was classic David. He ended an
email the Bromley schoolmate Jeff McCormick with thank you for
being my friend all these years and I miss you
lots now f off Amusingly, the last Twitter account that
David followed billed itself as belonging to God. Coincidence maybe,

(01:13:21):
or David Bowie was an expert level troll. David loved
to play with expectations. He did it with everything, his music,
his performances, his style, and we loved him for it.
In the end, he used his own existence to play
with us one more time, all in good fun. And

(01:13:42):
it was all so fun, wasn't it. The final images
of David released to the public show him dapper as
ever in a perfectly tailored suit in Fedora, grinning from
ear to ear, laughing in the face of death. May
we all be so fortunate. Our expectations of an ending,

(01:14:02):
learned from repeated story, film, narrative culture, gives us a
completely unjustified set of expectations for life, David once said,
and he's right. Humans compulsively look for the story arc
and ourselves and others. It helps us find meaning and
make order. And that's not reality in this case. Take

(01:14:24):
David's music. He's been grappling with his mortality on albums
for years. Any one of those could be held up
as a fitting farewell, the zen acceptance of Heathen or
the masterful comeback of the Next Day with the nostalgic
where are We Now? Black Star is simply where the
transmission stopped. The interpretation is on us. David would often say,

(01:14:48):
what people see in my songs is far more interesting
than what I actually put into them. The brilliance is
in the ambiguity. Following the release of the Next Day,
and David gently chastised cover designer Jonathan Barnbrook for describing
his meaning behind the sleeve art. David didn't approve. When

(01:15:09):
you do that, you devalue the end object, he insisted,
and you leave it less open for people to understand.
Make him wonder. Black Star is the same sort of
cat and mouse game that he lived for. The closest
he comes to tipping his hand is on the final track,
I Can't Give Everything Away, As the last song on

(01:15:32):
Bowie's last record, it's a fitting epitaph. Viewed one way,
it's a plea for privacy after fifty years of giving
himself over to the public, an explanation for keeping his
illness under wraps. There are some things he simply must
keep to himself. From another perspective, it's a stubborn refusal

(01:15:53):
to abandon his earthly life, his hard won happiness, and
all that he'd earned. He loved life, he loved his work.
It's hard to give it up and give everything away.
And finally, it's a playful tease. I can't tell you
everything that would give the game away. Put the clues

(01:16:14):
together and the song features a big one. The harmonica
riff is taken from the low track. A new career
in a new town, a song that harold it has
moved to Berlin forty years earlier. It's a piece about
moving on, starting fresh rebirth. For Bowie, the Buddhist death

(01:16:35):
is the ultimate rebirth as far as clues go. It's
a good one. But he can't give everything away. So
who was this man? This collection of characters, masks and
poses that we've explored over these episodes. Sorry to disappoint,
but I don't know any more than you do, and

(01:16:57):
that's sort of the fun of it. A curator for
the David Bowie Is Exhibition admitted that after the multi
year project was complete, he still was no closer to
figuring out who David Bowie actually was. And I second
that sentiment. We want David Bowie to be superhuman, in
touch with the cosmos and a master of space and time.

(01:17:21):
It makes a better story, but it is just a story,
one that he told so skillfully. But in a way
it obscures an even more amazing point. The fact that
he was just a person like you and me actually
makes it even more exciting. That means there's hope for
us to be great too, no excuses, And yet he

(01:17:53):
wasn't really like us, was he? The Psychics prediction the
musical hints the exquisitely timed exit. It's enough to make
you think. Was he ordained with all the worldly insights
or guidance? Was he an alien mystics sent down to
Earth to shake things up? I don't know myself, but

(01:18:15):
I can tell you a story. It was November of
David was filming the Lazarus music video. He knew something
that the rest of the cast and crew didn't. A
day earlier, he'd been told that his cancer had spread.
There was no chance of recovery. The decision was made

(01:18:36):
to stop treatment. He was over. David kept the news
to himself, but he still showed up to work. The
director suggested that he and the video by disappearing into
the large wardrobe and slamming the door. David thought about
it for a second before a big smile lit up
his face. When the end came and everything was stripped away,

(01:19:03):
he remained an artist, and what's an artist but an
alien mystic? The wardrobe looked unmistakably like a coffin. It
was perfect. Yeah, David said, that'll keep them guessing. Off

(01:19:41):
The record is a production of I Heart Radio. The
executive producers are Noel Brown and Shan t. Tone. The
supervising producers are Taylor Kogne and Tristan McNeil. The show
was researched, written and hosted by me Jordan run Talk
and edited, scored and sound designed by Taylor she Coogne
and Tristan McNeil, with additional music by Evan tire M.

(01:20:03):
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
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