Demon

Superstar: David Bowie on Stage

(Copyright extract from Jane Goodall, Stage Presence. Routledge 2009. Please refer
to Routledge copy for quotations and acknowledgements.)

Punk had introduced a form of reverse glamour through its chosen celebrities -
Johnny Rotten, Vivien Westwood, Malcolm McClaren, Jordan, Sid Vicious, Siouxsie
- figures who mugged for the camera with frayed hair and blotched faces, dressed in
moth eaten cardigans, rotted vests, rubber underwear and jewellery made of lavatory
chain. They understood instinctively how to trade in persona rather than personality,
the difference being that persona is personality at one remove, an assumed wardrobe
of attitudes and appearances that can be developed in response to circumstances.
The celebrity at this time who made most effective use of theatrical resources
in creating persona was David Bowie, whose mansion in Beckenham may well have
been a model for the Rocky Horror set. There was an ornate staircase, a minstrels’
gallery, and an approach to interior décor that combined art deco with hard rock. It
included a giant Regency bed that Bowie decked out ‘like a huge coffin with a
canopy.’i
Bowie’s 1972 concert at Manchester Free Trade Hall was nominated as one of
‘the 25 gigs of all time’ in an article in The Observer Music Monthly in January 2007.
‘I was in the eighth row of the stalls,’ wrote Paul Morley, and Bowie ‘as single
minded as any performer I’ve ever seen, was some kind of demon acting like some
kind of superstar ignoring the empty spaces in the hall, committing himself to turning
us on so he could turn himself on.’ii The impression in this account is that Bowie was
taking himself seriously, so much so that he virtually forced his own destiny onto a
higher – or at least more successful – plane, but Bowie had an early commitment to
parody. The kind of glamour affected by the group Hype, in which he formed as a
teenager, was the crudest burlesque, as described by Tony Visconti:
David was Rainbowman, dressed in Lurex, pirate boots with diaphanous
scarves pinned to his clothes… I was Hypeman in a mock Superman
costume with a white leotard, crocheted silver knickers and a big red
cape.iii
In performance, this went over like a lead balloon. Audiences responded with boos
and missiles.
 Bowie’s trademark androgyny and cross-dressing bravura were signals of
other forms of crossing. In his self-managed development as an independent
performer, he wanted hatred from the crowds in the auditorium, then adoration. He
steeped himself in the abrasive milieu of Berlin cabaret, read Dostoevsky, trained
with the avant-garde mime artist Lindsay Kemp, then returned to the commercial
world with the determination to make himself a superstar. When he did so, it was an
enterprise loaded with Nietzschean awareness. Bowie’s reading diet crossed between
superhero stories in Marvel Comics and Nietzsche’s writings on the übermensch. He
laced his Nietzschean inspiration with the occult ideas of the superhuman taken from
Aleister Crowley, the charismatic latter-day magus who founded the Hermetic Order
of the Golden Dawn and whose textbook guide to the acquisition of higher powers
began with the principle, ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.’iv
If anyone knows how to fuse modern glamour with gramarye it is Bowie. He
is one of those figures who consciously works to learn from the magnetism of other
charismatics, in widely different spheres: Crowley, Tesla, Bob Dylan, the comic book
Superman, Andy Warhol. From the earliest phase of his career, he studied the lore of
presence with an obsessive involvement but could switch to parodic mode when he
chose. There is as much Andy Warhol as Aleister Crowley in the invention of Ziggy
Stardust, one of the outstanding examples of persona-based staged presence in the
twentieth century. From Crowley he learned some of the potency of esoterics, and the
art of suggesting that the world was unimaginably large and strange. From Warhol he
took the postmodern consciousness of image as currency to be bought, accumulated,
sold and revalued. One of the reviewers of a 1972 concert in Oxford wrote that
‘Bowie’s never been a star but he’s studied some of the best, like Garbo and Presley,
and now he’s on top he knows what to do.’v
Beyond the Warhol principle, though, Bowie understood that it takes more
than iconography to create charisma on the stage. What he derived from the study of
stars from such widely different zones of the show-business galaxy was a highly
developed understanding of stage techniques. Whilst there was much generic raving
in Ziggy Stardust’s reception, there was also much astute commentary on the craft
and judgement he brought to the performances. Michael Watts noted his ‘gift for
artful mannerism’ and flair for ‘creating a convincing mise-en-scène’ combined with
‘a strong sense of biographical drama. Others praised him for his diction, his pace and
timing, the precision of his movements and the way he shifted mood to deepen the
dramatic involvement or recharge the energy levels.
The Ziggy Stardust stage show began as rough theatre: the key component of
the set was scaffolding, with a catwalk around the top accessed by removable ladders,
and the sawdust floor was sprinkled with glitter. Such were the elements used in
several alternative theatre productions at the time, including Lindsay Kemp’s
extraordinary Flowers (created in 1968) and to an audience in the know they
promised inventive physicality. This Bowie delivered in spades, using sequences of
Kemp-inspired mime to offset the loud sexuality of the rock numbers. As the success
built, so did the budget. When the show opened at London’s Rainbow Theatre in
August 1972, the scaffolding was still there but with added platforms and a lighting
design that created illusions of level. A team of Kemp’s mime dancers, performed
routines based on Chinese choreography, in which the ladders were scaled and turned
with seamless fluidity. Chris Welch, one of the more experienced and hard nosed of
the music journalists, found it ‘tremendously effective’ and described how Bowie,
‘clad in a suit of silver with matching boots… strode out with perfect timing to ankle
deep jets of smoke.’vi Plays and Players, the prestige magazine devoted to theatre, did
a feature review, beginning:
Judy Garland hasn’t left us! Rematerialised, reincarnated, her spirit today
enjoys comic existence with the inner consciousness of one transvestite
poseur, namely David Bowie, who recently returned to Earth with
something like the impact of nuclear fission.vii
The Garland association was less about image and persona than about
performance qualities – ‘the guts, the glitter, the charm, the force, the remoteness’ –
and, of course, the glamour. Though the sense of parody was something Bowie had
that Garland didn’t. ‘Bowie and his band are nothing if not superb parodists,’ Melody
Maker proclaimed, but it was not parody in the form of any overt satirical take-off.viii
It was something much more nuanced and comprehensive: a presentational approach
that was always playing with the virtual and the imaginable rather than the actual, a
twisting of the familiar codes of glamour to create an aura of strangeness. The
starman, after all, was an alien being.
When Bowie arrived for his debut at the Carnegie Hall no-one knew what to
expect, though anticipation ran so high that (as was widely reported) even Andy
Warhol could not get a ticket. At this point in his career, Bowie’s cross-over gifts
served him well. Like Rocky Horror, the Ziggy Stardust show had begun rough, but
its reinvention as a more technically sophisticated production for the Rainbow theatre
was good preparation for a high-end New York venue. He made the cut, even with
some of the most stringent judges. The New York Times reported that ‘as a performer,
Bowie delivered’:
He understands that theatricality has more to do with presence than with
gimmickry, and that beautifully coordinated physical movements and well-
planned music can reach an audience a lot quicker than high-decibel
electronics.ix
In reviews, Garland was cited repeatedly as the unlikely alter-ego ghosting the
performances on the American tour. Robert Hilburn, reporting on the Sanata Monica
show, said that Bowie ‘established the same delicate, separate sense of
communication with the audience that reminds you of Judy Garland.’
It is Hilburn who, of all the many critics trying to convey the impact of those
concerts, is most effective in describing the stage presence that was their catalyst. He
registered the ‘electric moment’ and ‘an incredible sense of “nowness”’ achieved
through specific forms of technical mastery:
Two things were immediately apparent. First, Bowie, with a background in
mime, has enormous stage control and is able to accomplish more with the
mere movement of his eyes than most performers in rock can do with a
whole series of exaggerated movements. His body is so disciplined that
Bowie can create the tension of a wild animal, a tiger or a panther, as he
prowls the stage, controlling the pace and direction of the show as he
moves.x
Evocations of compelling power, electricity and the prowling panther will by now be
very familiar to readers of this book. But in the annals of show business reportage, the
compelling witnesses are those who respond to the ‘unsayable’ phenomenon of stage
presence by finding new ways of putting it into words: a freshness of observation
takes over from the metaphoric repertoire built up through previous generations of
writing. What is captured here is that presence arises from present-ness: something is
being communicated on stage through the alertness and discipline of movement,
which begins with the movement of the eyes. There is ‘enormous’ control, but also
the unpredictability of larger energies.
 These qualities are clearly evident in the way Bowie has managed his overall
career. On his return from the US, he peremptorily announced the death of the Ziggy
Stardust persona, choosing the occasion of concert at the Hammersmith Odeon in July
1973 to do so, and without forewarning the band who were on stage with him. He
proceeded to move through a range of other personae, reinventing his style decade
after decade. One of the constants was his instinct for persona, a sense of identity that
was virtual and changeable; he used make-up as mask and costume as a means of
establishing an aesthetic.
Shelton Waldrep features Bowie as a case study in his book on the aesthetics
of self invention, where he suggests that Kemp’s influence ‘helped Bowie fashion a
career of ironizing detachment.’xi It was also an influence that fore-grounded
sexuality and gender crossing. Kemp’s own performances draw on Japanese traditions
of cross-gender playing to generate an aura of distraught pathos around his sexuality:
a man playing a woman, expressing feminine sexuality in ways that are both
impassioned and fragile, gives himself up to the pain of impossibility. In Flowers,
Kemp drew on the poetics of Genet to realize this, working with Genet’s perverse
fusion of pathos with obscenity and exhibitionism. In Bowie’s case there is less
investment in pathos, but his persona-shifting is similarly underpinned by an
existential feeling for the virtuality of identity. Identity is mask - an impossible
paradox - so the play between identities, taking off in the spirit of parody, is of the
essence.

i
Martin Aston, ‘Scary Monster,’ in 60 Years of David Bowie, Mojo Classic Vol. 2
no.2, 2007, 24.
ii
Paul Morley, ‘The Best 25 Gigs of all Time’ in The Observer Music Monthly,
January 21, 2007, 35.
iii
Mark Paytress, ‘Inventing Glam Rock,’ in 60 Years of David Bowie, 20.
iv
Aston, 25.
v
Peter Holmes, ‘Gay Rock’ in Gay News, July 1972. Online at
http://www.5years.com/gayrock.htm
vi
Chris Welch, ‘David Bowie’ in Melody Maker, 26 August 1972. Online at
http://www.5years.com/DBCW.htm
vii
Alexander Stuart, ‘Starman over the Rainbow,’ Plays and Players, November
1972. Online at http://www.5years.com/playplayers.htm
viii
Anonymous review, ‘Caught in the Act,’ Melody Maker, 19 February 1972. Online
at http://www.5years.com/mmfeb19.htm
ix
Don Heckman, ‘A Colourful David Bowie,’ The New York Times, 1 October, 1972.
Online at http://www.5years.com/heckman72.htm
x
Robert Hilburn, ‘David Bowie Rocks in Santa Monica,’ Los Angeles Times, 23
October, 1972. Online at Online at http://www.5years.com/hilburn72.htm
xi
Shelton Waldrep, The Aesthetics of Self-Invention: Oscar Wilde to David Bowie
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 108.