Underground (opening titles, film).
Underground (single edit, video).
Underground (soundtrack).
Underground (extended dance mix).

“Underground” is dressed to be epic, with a set of soul royalty for its backing singers: Luther Vandross, Chaka Khan, Cissy Houston, Fonzi Thornton (Chic, plus Roxy Music’s Avalon), Eunice Peterson (a great R&B session singer, working with Aretha Franklin, among others), Renelle Stafford (another legend—she’s on Paul Simon’s “Mother and Child Reunion”) and members of the Radio Choir of the New Hope Baptist Church. And its lead guitarist is the master bluesman Albert Collins.

Unfortunately, the song’s not good enough to justify their presence, and the guest players fail to transport it anywhere. It doesn’t help that Arif Mardin often drowns them in the mix. Nor was the song good enough for the public, as it turned out: “Underground” completely flopped in the US, not even cracking the Billboard 100, and had a mediocre charting in the UK. Bowie has never performed it on stage, and his only promotional effort for it was Steve Barron’s elaborate video, with puppets, animation sequences (budgets for these apparently shot up after a-Ha’s “Take On Me”) and a Doctor Who regeneration style-montage of past Bowie incarnations.

There’s no great mystery why “Underground” failed: it’s a draggy, overproduced song that squanders its resources. Take how long it takes to get to the big payoff—the call-and-response refrain—and then, after finally unveiling the chorus, Bowie trudges all the way back to the start and repeats the entire song again: a sax solo, another verse, another pre-chorus, another bridge. It’s almost two minutes before we get back to the refrain.

And even the chorus (which kicks off with a key change to C major, from the original G)—which finds Bowie in good, rough voice (“DADDY DADDY get me OUTTA HERE!”) and Richard Tee enlivening things with romping juke-joint piano—isn’t as electrifying as it wants to be. Something feels missing. Again, some of it’s due to the production—the “choir” chorus, a set of fantastic pro singers, is often a faceless blob, placed low and back in the mix, hanging like a leaden cloud. So when Bowie’s parrying against the chorus and rallying them, their responses seem off, distant, detached. Compare the wild, luxurious warmth of Vandross and Robin Clark’s singing on “Young Americans,” the way that they buffet and sway Bowie, how they make him fight to keep command of the song. There’s none of that drama in “Underground,” there’s no dialogue. Only at the end of the coda, when a few of the female singers start jazzing up the melody (“wanna live UN-DER-GROUND!!“) is there finally a spark, and it’s quickly snuffed out by the fadeout.

Bowie’s foray into gospel pop wasn’t just an attempt at reviving the Young Americans magic—the sound was trendy in the mid-Eighties, with choirs carted in for show-stoppers like Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is” or the Rattle and Hum version of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” For those tracks, the choir was the loud, warm community that welcomes the solitary, questing singer and bears him up. So give Bowie some credit: his gospel choir instead gleefully sings about a delusory world, one that well could be a purgatory or hell. The choir blindly supports the singer in his actions, though he doesn’t know what he wants himself: they’re blissful enablers. He’s tempted to disappear into a world of imagination, or could even be contemplating suicide, and he’s lost and bewildered—hence his occasional screams for help (dutifully repeated by the choir). But is he asking to get out of the world, or is he already trapped in his illusions?

While his lyric is dreadful in places (“too much protection/no love injection“? was this outsourced to Sammy Hagar?), Bowie sings much of it with confidence and precision—he’s dedicated to keeping the unwieldy piece on the tracks, going falsetto at times to goose things up. But he doesn’t sell the “tough” line in the verse—”don’t tell me the truth hurts, little girl…/’cos it hurts like hell.” It’s not only nonsensical (truth hurts? no it really hurts, baby) but Bowie’s slurred, huffed-out phrase makes him come off as a petulant teenager. Maybe that was the intention. It doesn’t help that he’s rhyming off of ”it’s not always swell.”

So while “Underground” is fine for a singalong end titles theme, what a great squandered opportunity. This is the return of Luther Vandross, now an R&B superstar, into Bowie’s orbit? This is the only time Chaka Khan ever appears on a Bowie record? This is how you use the Iceman—confine him low in one channel, have him noodle over half a verse against a wall of synthesizers, then give him a solo in the coda where he spends his time fighting to be heard? It’s bizarre that Bowie/Mardin assembled all of these icons but made the principal players in the final mix the session keyboardist Robbie Buchanan, the drum programming of Steve Ferrone and Bob Gay on generic saxophone. I’m surprised they didn’t hire Miles Davis and then swap out most of his trumpet lines for Fairlight dubs.

Recorded ca. late 1985. For Labyrinth, there were two takes of “Underground” used—a slower-tempo choir-free cut for the opening credits, with the song married to Trevor Jones’ score (which sounds like incidental music for a lesser hour of the Olympic Games telecast), and the six-minute uptempo “master” version for the end titles. An edit of the latter was issued as a single on 23 June 1986 (EMI America 216, #21 UK); there was also an eight-minute dance mix, which is far and away the best use of the choir. Three years later, another song would marry a gospel choir chorus to synth basslines and ricocheting beats, and who knows, its author was possibly influenced by “Underground.” But she did it with a bit more style.

Top: Jamel Shabazz, “Brooklyn, 1985.”

Within You (film).
Within You (soundtrack).

Labyrinth‘s climactic song is a brief piece of psychotic recitative with an unstable time signature (it’s shifting between 3/4, 4/4 and 6/4, though much of the first half is in free time); it lacks a melody and its refrain, if there is one, is a wailing three-line expiration. Who knows what Jim Henson made of “Within You” when he heard it, but he gamely built a sequence around it.

The scene: Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) finally reaches the heart of the Labyrinth, where she discovers an M.C. Escher-inspired three-dimensional set of stairwells. Sarah, like many bright teenagers in the Eighties, has Escher’s Relativity poster on her wall—it’s another clue that the entire Labyrinth world has been assembled out of her mind. Bowie confronts her—only now he’s apparently a hologram able to walk on walls—and she defeats his stratagem by choosing to sacrifice herself (or her potential adulthood) to save her brother.

But the histrionic “Within You” doesn’t really work here. The problem (as commenter Pinstripe Hourglass noted on “As the World Falls Down”) is that Labyrinth has consistently retreated into pretending it’s only a girl’s adventure story whenever it’s encountered signs of adolescent turmoil, so that Sarah and Jareth’s connection is based on a single scene, the ballroom hallucination sequence. Having Jareth act like a catastrophically devastated lover here seems off base. You could argue that he’s offering a variant of the alluring sexual fantasy of the “World Falls Down” scene, with Sarah here shown the operatic emotions of an imagined adulthood, the potential to be heartbroken so much that you can’t breathe. That said, Sarah spends most the sequence running up and down stairs to fetch her brother, as if she’s playing the last level of Dragon’s Lair.

“Within You” begins an octave-spanning bass-synth motif that Bowie’s opening phrases parallel, then there’s a quartet of higher-pitched, more desperate lines (e.g., “your EYES can be so CRUEL”, with Bowie peaking on a high G for each line) that lead to a collapse: the quasi-refrain that expires with the four-bar “I—I can’t live within you.” The portentous vocal and the chimes-of-doom synthesizers suggest that Bowie’s slightly mocking the high dramatics of his Berlin records—it’s like “Warszawa” reworked by a heartsick Goth.

Even by that standard, the arrangement is overkill, with four keyboardists (Brian Gascoigne , David Lawson, Robbie Buchanan and Simon Lloyd) apparently in a contest to see who could go most over the top—maybe Arif Mardin was offering a prize at the end of the session. The laurel should’ve gone to whoever did the synth arpeggios.

Recorded: ca. July-September 1985, London. On the Labyrinth OST.

Top: Simon Knott, “Moscow, 1985.”

As the World Falls Down (film).
As the World Falls Down (soundtrack).
As the World Falls Down (single edit, video).

Labyrinth is a schizophrenic film, split between its rite-of-passage metaphor for teenage girls and its garish outer packaging, with puppet dances, Monty Python-style absurdity and post-modernism (the world of Labyrinth is a compost of children’s literature, from Maurice Sendak—thanked by name in the credits—to the Oz books). Jim Henson tried to hook both five-year-old boys and their adolescent sisters, and eventually the tonal shifts proved too much; the film doesn’t feel whole, or quite coherent, and it ends in an odd compromise. It didn’t help that the eternal boy George Lucas rewrote some of the script.

That said, the most striking scene to survive from Henson’s adolescent metaphor is when Jennifer Connelly’s character, having been given a drugged peach, falls into a dream. Possibly hallucinating or spiritually abducted, she winds up at a masked ball where she dances with Bowie’s Goblin King: the two stare at each other with fairly unbridled lust (again, Connelly is 14 in this movie). While Connelly’s come to this world as a champion of childhood, looking to win back her infant brother, here the adult world, with all its temptations, is laid out before her, embodied by Bowie at his most Byronic (or Dashiell Hammett’s first description of Sam Spade: “he looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.”) The set and costumes, which seem inspired by the video for Adam Ant’s “Prince Charming,” are a sudden burst of New Romanticism, and the scene’s set to Bowie’s lush “As the World Falls Down.”

In line with the film’s tonal shifts, there’s a change from Bowie’s loud singalong puppet songs of the early part of the film (“Chilly Down,” “Magic Dance’) to the somber, quiet pieces of the last reels, which Bowie’s Jareth sings alone. “As the World Falls Down,” as some commenters have noted, is essentially Bowie channeling Bryan Ferry, who in his contemporary solo album, Boys and Girls, continued to play off the existential Continental romantic mood of Roxy Music’s Avalon (see “Windswept” or the title track). When Bowie sings ev’ry thrill has gone, wasn’t too much fun at all, it’s pure jaded Ferry.

Though encased in dated High Eighties production by Arif Mardin, “World Falls Down” has one of Bowie’s loveliest melodies of the era. The verse’s opening slight upward pushes on “sad love” or “pale jewel” build to longer, again-rising phrases (“within your EYES”) but there’s a tumbling downward in the closing phrase. The chorus has some lovely extended phrasing, culminating in a ruse—the last line of the chorus (the title line) seems as though it’s another declining phrase until Bowie suddenly, lightly soars up a fifth to hold on the dominant note, “DOWN.”

The track’s main musical hook is a five-note, eleventh-spanning bassline by Will Lee, while on the extended soundtrack version of “World Falls Down,” a guitar solo (either Jeff Mironov or Nicky Moroch) briefly pulls the song out of its A major fastness—it’s a mildly chaotic performance, with two quick shifts into 3/4 time. Much of Bowie’s lyric, with its valentines and goopy sentiments like “I’ll place the moon within your heart,” is greeting-card stuff, sure, but it’s deliberate. Someone who’s never been in love before, like Connelly’s character, has to start somewhere, with place-filler phrases to stand for incomprehensible emotions. If it begins in adolescent tumult, the song ends with long stretches of adult melancholy, Bowie murmuring “falling in love” to himself until the fade.

Recorded ca. July-September 1985, London. First issued on the Labyrinth OST, June 1986. While it was slated for a single release at Christmas 1986 to coincide with Labyrinth‘s UK premiere, complete with a video shot by Steve Barron (it’s an odd promo featuring the puppet Hoggle, a very Dorian Gray-looking Bowie and a fax machine as a lead actor), the single was scrapped at the eleventh hour for unknown reasons. Pegg speculates, and I agree, that it was likely Bowie clearing the stage for the harder “protest” material that he would offer on his next record in April ’87. “World Falls Down” very well may have been a hit, Bowie’s own “Lady in Red” or “Careless Whisper”; whether the world needed that, however, is debatable.

Inspired cover: Girl in a Coma, 2010.

Top: Andrzej Jerzy Lech, “Sopot, Polska 1985.”

Magic Dance (film).
Magic Dance (soundtrack).

In the summer of 1986, EMI’s vice president of A&R, Neil Portnow, spoke at an industry panel about the soundtrack album boom. Footloose, Flashdance, Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun—all had churned out #1 hits and had dominated the album charts. Portnow said it signaled a shift, that films and videos were replacing radio as the way people heard new music. But the strategy had its downsides—too many films, too many soundtracks, and an artist risked overexposure, becoming a parody of himself.

Portnow* singled out Bowie by name. “In the past he was an anonymous, mystical character, out of the public eye.” But with Bowie starring in Absolute Beginners and Labyrinth back-to-back (the films were released with months of each other) and being a heavy presence on each soundtrack LP, he made things “difficult from a record industry standpoint, because it conflicts with the mystical [persona].” Portnow slammed Labyrinth in particular: “The lyrics were about puppy dogs and goblins—not relevant to Bowie’s career from the mystical standpoint.“

Cut to a castle room. A man with an enormous shock of hair and wearing ridiculously tight pants** dances a jig around two score gyrating puppets, occasionally grabbing a baby and hurling him high in the air. “DANCE—MAGIC DANCE! DANCE—MAGIC DANCE!“

At the time, this was the end for many old fans. Already alienated by global populist Bowie and disappointed by his latest album, the old ravers and New Romantics now met Bowie’s latest incarnation: a dancing master Goblin King who looked like he was going to do an ice-skating routine later in the picture. So Bowie had fully lost the plot. And Portnow’s public grousing showed that EMI was also bewildered by what their marquee artist was doing. Where was the next record? What was this Dark Fraggle Rock nonsense?

Of course, this ignored the fact that Bowie was winning a new generation of fans by starring in Labyrinth, and that he was having a blast doing it, briefly free from the burden of following himself up.

The ridicule “Magic Dance” got (and still gets) reminds me of the knocks that “Laughing Gnome” took (and still takes). They’re both goofy songs designed for kids, they’re both pure products of their time (the woodwind-heavy “Gnome” is pure 1967, while “Magic Dance” is like an aural time capsule of a synthesizer-saturated 1985) and both have far more going on than at first appears.

For one thing, “Magic Dance” is full of self-parody and inside jokes. Take the opening “what babe? that babe” routine, which Bowie lifted almost verbatim from a gag between Cary Grant and Shirley Temple in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (which, like Labyrinth, is about a young girl attracted to a much older, charismatic artist figure). Or how the first lines of the verse seem to goof on the pathos of Iggy Pop finding his dead junkie girlfriend in “Tonight.” (A wry Nicholas Pegg suggestion.)

And the song itself, apart from the line about the goblin babe, has nothing to do with Labyrinth at all –it’s just Bowie playing on the classic rock & roll theme of using black magic for love (“Love Potion No. 9″, “Fortune Teller,” “I Put a Spell on You”). The singer’s girl is depressed or just doesn’t care for him anymore, so he runs through all the magic spells he wants to use to get her back. But as the chorus notes, all she wants to do is dance.

“Magic Dance” has one of Bowie’s strongest vocal melodies of the period, too, with the verse a run of delayed satisfactions until, midway through, there’s a slow, steady move up an octave, climaxing in Bowie’s “Bay-bee BLUE…NO-BO-DY KNEW”! It’s the most alive he’s sounded in years. Or the crafty call-and-response in the chorus, in which the backing singers take the lead, while Bowie waits until the third beat of each bar to counter them.

And the chorus’ closing line, “slap that baby—make him free!” continues the song’s mix of whimsy and wisdom—it’s a silly line, meant to be howled by goblin puppets, sure, but it’s also incisive. Because when would you slap a baby? To make it breathe just after it’s born. In a film that’s one long metaphor about leaving childhood behind, the line suggests that once a child comes into the world and is slapped into life, she’s already free from her mother; she’s starting off on a long journey of her own.

Problem is, “Magic Dance” worked fine as a three-minute scene in the film. For the official soundtrack recording, however, it was extended to over five minutes (there was even a seven-minute dance mix): after the upteenth repeat of the chorus, it starts to really drag. The extended mix is most notable for Dan Huff’s flashy eight-bar guitar solo. Hats off to him. Mick Ronson got “Width of a Circle,” Alan Parker got “Rebel Rebel,” Earl Slick got “Station to Station,” Robert Fripp got “Heroes.” Huff, drawing a pair of deuces, got “Magic Dance.” He does what he can.

For the studio version of “Dance,” Diva Gray, Fonzi Thornton and the bassist Will Lee were the backing singers, though Bowie (a la “Gnome”) did much of the voice work himself, including the baby gurgles: they had wanted to use Gray’s child, but the baby would keep quiet whenever the mike was on.

Recorded ca. July-September 1985, London. Released on the Labyrinth OST in June 1986. An extended dance mix was issued as a single in the US in January 1987 (EMI America 19217), but it went nowhere.

* Portnow has done well for himself—he’s currently head of NARAS and gives an address at the Grammys every year. His quotes are from the 2 August 1986 issue of Billboard.

** An endnote on the infamous pants. I saw Labyrinth when it came out in ’86, when I was 14, and all I took from it was a few odd jokes, a few nightmarish images (esp. the “helping hands”) and a honking crush on Ms. Connelly. The idea that there was anything prominent about Bowie’s outfit completely escaped me at the time. But throughout the past two decades, whenever Labyrinth has come up in conversation, the issue of Bowie’s pants is always raised. Apparently an entire generation now credits Bowie’s pants with kick-starting puberty, to the point where Bowie’s pants have become a cliche, a pop-cultural touchstone. There is a Facebook group dedicated to it, it’s a common Tumblr tag and a popular drinking game.

So yes, it’s there, it’s mighty and it’s apparently quite life-altering. And it was deliberate. Labyrinth‘s designer took Bowie’s conceit that Jareth was a failed rock star (“a young girl’s dream of a pop star”), who was stuck ruling a backwater goblin kingdom that no one ever visits, while all he wanted to do was hang out in a nightclub somewhere. So Bowie’s outfits are burlesques of a rock star’s garb: he’s a pantomime satyr. Consider Jareth a desperate would-be Ziggy Stardust, one who never got out of the provinces: “well hung, and snow-white tan.”

Top: “Jason Bell breakdancing in The Dell, Wellington [NZ], during Summer City, 4 January 1985.” Dominion Post staff photographer (Reference number: EP/1985/0078/8A-F). The Dominion Post Collection, Photographic Archive, Alexander Turnbull Library.

Chilly Down (film).
Chilly Down (soundtrack).

So here we intersect with a parallel world—two universes are briefly in sync. I’m talking about the cults of Bowie and of Labyrinth, the 1986 Jim Henson film in which Bowie starred as the Goblin King, Jareth, and for which he wrote five songs. To make an overly broad assumption, for the average Bowie fan or pop music fan, Labyrinth is an odd, dismissible footnote in Bowie’s career. For the Labyrinth fan, however, Bowie’s portrayal of Jareth is the best thing that he ever did—for some, it’s the only thing that they know Bowie did. (Take a recent Digital Spy reader’s survey of the Top 10 Bowie songs of all time: “Magic Dance” made the cut. Labyrinth fans are legion.)

Henson originally conceived Jareth as a puppet, but then rethought the character as a charismatic human actor “with musical talent.” Bowie soon came to mind (the other top candidates were Michael Jackson and Sting). Meeting Bowie in New York during the Serious Moonlight tour, Henson offered him the role, showing Bowie some of Brian Froud’s sketches for the proposed film, and giving him a tape of The Dark Crystal, Henson’s first foray into more “adult” fantasy. Once Bowie received the Terry Jones-penned script for Labyrinth, which he enjoyed for its “inane insanity,” Bowie was game.

So from April to September 1985 Bowie spent long weeks in Elstree Studios making a film in which his co-stars were an infant, a cast of puppets (the first days of Bowie’s shooting were mostly a loss, as Bowie kept looking offstage whenever a puppeteer spoke his lines) and a 14-year-old actress with whom he had the best on-screen chemistry of his career (Jennifer Connelly, to Marc Spitz: “I was just this side of getting it. Getting who David Bowie was. He was really sweet. I liked him very much.” And Bowie compared her at the time to the young Elizabeth Taylor). When Iggy Pop turned up in London to play Bowie some of his new songs, he was bemused to find Bowie spending his days in a Tina Turner fright wig and ridiculously tight trousers (more on the infamous pants in a later entry). And some at Bowie’s label, EMI, were starting to publicly worry about what Bowie was doing.

Think of Bowie’s five Labyrinth songs as a secret mid-Eighties Bowie album. It finds Bowie in his typical scrapper mode, using pieces he had considered for a “proper” album and repurposing them for the soundtrack of a fantasy movie. Bowie reworked old themes, looking for flashes of life, still trying to write himself out of his funk. So a rousing singalong goofy kid’s song (“Magic Dance”) is also a pop trope as old as “Love Potion No. 9″; the ballad “As the World Falls Down” is one of his loveliest, saddest pieces of the era; the brief “Within You” calls back to the Berlin records and even Baal; and the main theme song is a compromised attempt at a Young Americans sequel, complete with the return of Luther Vandross.

Then there’s “Chilly Down.” The context, for those who haven’t seen the film: Connelly, looking for her kidnapped brother, falls into a pit, which is populated by five jabbering puppets, the Fireys. They dance around her, their heads float off and plop down, they rip out their eyeballs, play croquet with their limbs, they maybe attempt to kill her—it’s not quite clear, as it’s a poorly-directed and shot scene, with Connelly lamely wandering around, then decapitating puppets, one by one. (My mother, upon watching this scene in a recent family screening: “well, that’s it for me,” and left the room.) It’s also the worst-looking sequence in the film: where much of Labyrinth has gorgeous sets and matte paintings, this is mostly green-screen antics; it’s as though Henson took The Claws of Axos as his main visual inspiration here.

“Chilly Down” was the first piece Bowie wrote for the film, and its rhythm tracks were cut during the Absolute Beginners/”Dancing in the Street” sessions in late June 1985. (It’s the same lineup: Neil Conti on drums, Matthew Seligman on bass, Kevin Armstrong on guitar.) Bowie cut a guide vocal for the puppet voice artists—Charles Augins, Danny John-Jules, Kevin Clash (Elmo’s voice) and Richard Bodkin*—and Bowie’s voice is still faintly audible at times in the mix.

Creepy cod-reggae voices aside, “Chilly” is a mildly interesting song: you can hear Bowie in places toying with the chorus melody of “Absolute Beginners” (there’s the same descending piano line) while the lyric, about a gang of grubby layabouts with no money who are dedicated to keeping it chill, is something Bowie could’ve written for Iggy Pop to sing (“strut your nasty stuff, wiggle in the middle yeh” or even better, “good times, bad food“). And only Bowie would throw in an out-of-key chord change (a move to E-flat in what’s been a straight A major song) in the middle of a rap written for a puppet.

Recorded ca. June-August 1985, London. Released 27 June 1986 on the Labyrinth OST (EMI America SV-17206) to coincide with the film’s US release. (Oddly enough, the soundtrack came out in the UK at the same time, although the UK didn’t get the film until the following Christmas.)

* According to the soundtrack LP credits and Nicholas Pegg’s guidebook. The Wikipedia entry lists different singers, including Karen Prell and Rob Mills, without attribution.

Dancing in the Street (Jagger and Bowie).
Dancing in the Street (Jagger and (sorta) Bowie, live, 1986).

We should begin by noting that this record was made for charity and, as it sold well, it presumably made a decent sum of money, and perhaps a trace of that money, the remainder after the bankers, customs men, grifter politicians and local warlords had been sated, served to feed and clothe some indigent people. So that’s a good and noble thing, and should be commended.

And the record was only a bonus souvenir, a by-popular-demand single release. Today it would’ve just been a viral YouTube clip, a format for which its ludicrous video is still well suited. Recorded on the fly, in under five hours (it shows), its video was shot on the cheap, in under twelve hours (it shows). Calling such a ramshackle charity throwaway one of the worst rock & roll singles of all time seems like overkill.

That said, Bowie and Mick Jagger’s “Dancing in the Street” is a rotten record for which everyone involved should be embarrassed. Most likely are, perhaps even Jagger, the single’s main architect, in his fleeting moments of humility. The fact that it’s Bowie’s last UK #1 and his last Top 10 American hit is terrible, sure, but it’s not that shocking. Our careers often end in ridicule or disgrace. Chuck Berry went out with “My Ding a Ling.”

Jagger and Bowie originally had planned to sing a cross-continental duet during Live Aid—Bowie in London, Jagger in New York—but an insurmountable satellite issue (due to signal delays, they would be either a second behind or ahead of each other) made a hash of that plan. So instead Bowie and Jagger decided to make a video to air during the concert. Having first considered Bob Marley’s “One Love” (just imagine that for a moment), they instead decided to cover Martha and the Vandellas.

While the rhythm tracks and vocals of “Dancing in the Street” were cut one night during Bowie’s Absolute Beginners sessions at the end of June 1985, with the same band Bowie used for that soundtrack, Jagger soon took over the show, bringing the tapes back with him to New York in early July and larding them with horns, backing singers who sounded like they came from a karaoke machine and generic guitar contributions by G.E. Smith and Earl Slick.

It hadn’t been an inspired session, with the band slogging through takes of “Dancing” to get the feel of it, as they’d just learned the song, and sounding “fucking awful…like a cabaret band,” as producer Alan Winstanley recalled to David Buckley. (“I had my head in my hands, thinking, what the fuck is this?” he added.)  Jagger’s arrival got everyone down to business, with most of the lead vocals soon cut in a single take. However drummer Neil Conti recalled Jagger “on an ego trip,” strutting around the studio, establishing his alpha credentials even to the tea boys. Bowie, in a genial mood or perhaps just drunk, gave Jagger the reins (Conti recalled Bowie smiling “Sphinx-like…while Jagger sneered at the engineer“), an imbalance of power that continued in both the video, where Bowie plays Robin to Jagger’s louche Batman, and in the pair’s single live performance of “Dancing,” at the 1986 Prince’s Trust concert, where Jagger utterly dominates the song, thanks in part to either a wonky mike or poor sound mixing for Bowie.

In the summer of 1985 Jagger was trying to work himself up as a solo artist, with a mild hit debut record, She’s the Boss, to his credit. The Rolling Stones were a mess: Jagger and Keith Richards were barely speaking, Bill Wyman had his eye on the door, Ron Wood was in a genial orbit of celebrity parties and recording sessions, poor Charlie Watts was on heroin. The Stones hadn’t made a good record in years, and the band now seemed like a quarreling, aging touring company.*

While Richards never had much use for Bowie (see the bitchy aside in his recent autobiography), Jagger seemed to admire, or at least envy, Bowie’s craftiness and his newfound commercial sense. Like Bowie, Jagger was focused on keeping his sound current; unlike Bowie, Jagger tended to come upon trends a bit past their sell-by date (so pushing the Stones into reggae, disco, even rap (“Too Much Blood”)). He used Bowie’s recent work as a template for his own debut, to the point where you wonder if Jagger sent a copy of Let’s Dance to his producer with a note attached: “How do you go about getting one of these?” Jagger nabbed some of Bowie’s former collaborators to play on his album, including Nile Rodgers and Carlos Alomar (co-writer of the title track and the non-classic “Lucky In Love”).

And there’s some desperation to this junk version of “Dancing in the Street,” with both parties trying to affirm their A-1 celebrity status. One of the more pernicious effects of the whole Live Aid/Farm Aid/Band Aid spectacle was to cement the hierarchy of the “legend” rock acts and a smaller tier of anointed successors from the slightly-younger generation (Tom Petty, Sting, Dire Straits, U2). It was the height of the Boomer Counter-Reformation. The late Eighties would see the over-publicized returns of everyone from Steve Winwood to the Monkees to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, to a revamped George Harrison to a MOR version of Pink Floyd to Robbie Robertson pretending that he was Peter Gabriel (a version of Gabriel who couldn’t sing) to an all-star Yes and a Zeppelin-sampling Robert Plant, culminating in the return of the “revitalized” Stones in 1989, the touring company now reincorporated into a gleaming multinational. As Marcello Carlin said back when Popular covered this single: “Suddenly we were once again reminded who in pop and rock mattered and who didn’t…With their massacre of “Dancing In The Street,” Bowie and Jagger seemed to relish rubbing it in.“

Worse, the song that Jagger and Bowie desecrated, “Dancing in the Street”, was originally a record that fulfilled every promise rock & roll ever made. It sounded as bright as the sun, with Martha Reeves as a beautiful embodiment of youth and revolution, built on a colossal double-thick beat (Marvin Gaye (allegedly) slamming on drums, in a frenetic language of fills and breakneck turnarounds, while the future free jazz drummer Steve Reid chases after him), with carnival horns and the Vandellas as a raucous second line. “Dancing” was global in its aspirations, local in its intentions—Reeves singles out Washington and Detroit—and its emotional tenor captured the sense of dance as collective liberation, a full commitment to the present (and the future). There are few records so public, in all the best senses of that word. Towards the fade, when Reeves sings let’s form a big strong line, its political reading becomes unmistakable—it’s not just doing the conga, but marching in Selma.

Sure, Van Halen had already turned “Dancing” into a slick piece of pop metal disco and The Big Chill already had masticated Motown into nostalgic pap. But there’s something especially cheap and grotesque in Bowie and Jagger’s pantomime reduction of “Dancing,” especially Jagger, who knew better (he’d sampled the lyric on his own “Street Fightin’ Man”). It’s just a charity show, yes, it’s just a laugh, yes, it’s just for fun, yes, but it’s also two sad men selling off their youth at cut rates.

Highlights of the video:

1) Jagger’s dancing, especially in the opening verse, reminds one of Truman Capote’s snark about Jagger’s stage act: “as sexy as a pissing frog.”

2) The choreography makes a bit more sense if you imagine that each of them are pretending to duet with Tina Turner.

3) A small charm is Bowie’s role as foil here—he’s often acting like a gawky fan who won an MTV contest to co-star in a video with Jagger. The dopey hand twirling movements, the half-assed judo kicks.

4) That said, when Bowie sways his hips and clasps himself as he lip-syncs “streets of Brazil!” is the absolute nadir of his performing life.

5) Jagger had been a fashion casualty for years, so his sherbet-green puffy shirt and purple caddy pants are just par for the course. But you’d expect better from Bowie than the camouflage pajamas and over-sized raincoat.

6) St. Vincent, on Twitter: “Bowie and Jagger “Dancing in the Street” video duet is the biggest anti-cocaine ad you ask for. #ihavethatjacket“. Sadly, I don’t think you can blame coke for this one.

7) After all the hard work Bowie did in 1983-1984 establishing his heterosexual bonafides, he releases a single whose sleeve could’ve doubled for a gay porn film advertisement and whose video ends with a freeze-frame of his and Jagger’s synchronized ass-waggle.

8) “That happened and we let it happen“: trenchant YouTube comment (actually “Family Guy” reference, see comments).

Recorded 29-30 June 1985, Abbey Road Studios (with overdubs in New York in early July). Premiered at Live Aid, 13 July 1985, and released on 19 August 1985 as EMI America 204 (#1 UK, #7 US).

* The record the Stones were making in the summer of 1985, Dirty Work, is like the final, chaotic days of a marriage, with Jagger singing about nuclear war, money-grubbers, cheaters and violent sex, with a reoccurring motif of wanting to beat the shit out of someone (“Fight,” “One Hit (to the Body)”). It should have been their last album. (Christgau: We should be thankful the old reprobate [Jagger] didn’t lavish much personal attention on it, that he just plugged into his Stones mode and spewed what he had to spew. Let him express himself elsewhere. The individual Rolling Stones can have their own disgusting lives and careers—I don’t care. What I want is the Rolling Stones as an entity, an idea—that’s mine and yours as much as theirs. And it’s the Rolling Stones as an idea that Dirty Work vindicates“).

** Best obscure cover of “Dancing in the Street”: the Carpenters’ freaky jazz-trio version from 1968.

Top: Lee Friedlander, “Boston, 1985,” from the series MIT (1985-1986) (LF: “The working project was named “Changing Technology.” I chose to photograph people working at computers as these ubiquitous machines seemed to be the vehicle for that change. The pictures were made in the environs of Route 128, a loop road around Boston, which at the time was considered a northeastern Silicon Valley.“) (It went bust five years later.)

Absolute Beginners.
Absolute Beginners (single edit).
Absolute Beginners (dub mix).
Absolute Beginners (live, 1987).
Absolute Beginners (broadcast, 2000).
Absolute Beginners (live, 2002).

I recall reading somewhere (a commenter on Popular, most likely) a DJ taken by the response he got whenever he played “Absolute Beginners,” especially towards the end of an evening. It’s the Bowie song that people forget they love, he said.

If “Ashes to Ashes” kills off world-altering Bowie, “Absolute Beginners” finishes world-popular Bowie. Very nearly a UK #1 (held off by Diana Ross’ “Chain Reaction” and a Cliff Richard/Young Ones duet), “Beginners” is the end of Bowie’s days in mainstream pop, with only one more solo appearance in the UK Top 10 to come in this survey. While some of its chart success was due to Absolute Beginners hype (which explains in part why “Beginners” died such a death in the US, only reaching #53, as the film flopped there), “Beginners” was loved too, as it was one of Bowie’s most open, most heartfelt-seeming songs, even if he occasionally sounded like Neil Diamond on the chorus (especially on “hard lines”).

Having recently looked up pop hits of my childhood in the late Seventies-early Eighties (as memory-triggers for this new project), I was struck by how many of them had been “adult” pop songs, for lack of a better word—songs about commitment, missed chances, regrets, sacrifices, sneaking around, feeling used up but still keeping at it. Some were saccharine and self-deceiving, some were home truths. “Still the One,” “Reminiscing,” “Against All Odds,” “Secret Lovers,” ““Oh Sherrie,” “Hard to Say I’m Sorry,” “Glory Days,” “Solid,” “Still the Same,” “Don’t Answer Me,” and so on. At some point, by the turn of the century, country music had annexed most of these songs, leaving today’s pop charts far more ruthlessly dedicated to the pleasures and preoccupations of youth (with many exceptions of course, Beyoncé being the first that comes to mind).

This outcome would’ve been fine for me as a kid, because I always hated when some ballad about being lost in middle-aged love knocked off an important song like “Rock Me Amadeus” in the charts. But as dreary as I thought them, the songs were a collective undercurrent, giving warnings that life in the years ahead would have different pleasures, different worries, than those I was consumed with then. It was perhaps the last time the pop charts were a generational dialogue, even if both sides weren’t particularly interested in listening to each other.

This is a long way of saying that “Absolute Beginners” falls into this decaying line of adult pop—it’s not a song for young people, though Bowie casts himself as a beginner in love. His nearly-improvised lyric, marked by slant rhymes (“ocean/reason” or “offer/beginner”), is subtly an extended pledge of love as one long equivocation. Even at his most heartfelt, Bowie’s still hedging something.

A heartbroken man is trying out love once more. He’s been down so long that it feels like it’s the first time again, and he’s so intoxicated by the promise that he feels as though he can start over from scratch. But he can’t, and he knows it—his eyes are open, his feet are on the ground, he’s unfortunately sane. The first verse closes with “I absolutely love you/but we’re absolute beginners“: it’s a declaration undermined with a quick caveat. If I don’t know anything about love anymore, then I don’t know if this will work.

There’s wariness in the chorus as well, despite the unbounded joy of the vocal melody and the soaring sentiments about flying over mountains and laughing at oceans (though recall that Bowie’s not talking about love here but its commercial vehicles—songs and films). Where the first chorus finds Bowie reassuring his love, saying that there’s no reason to dwell on the past, to be pessimistic, by the chorus repeat he’s come back down. If there are reasons to be afraid, if you are worried you’re making another mistake, then you may well be right. And you realize Bowie’s been playing with the word “absolute” the whole time. “Absolute” as an adjective means an unconditional fact, as in a pledge of “absolute” love, but the word also means to be completely independent, to be utterly whole. Two absolute beginners may be awful lovers, for they’re complete in themselves and need nothing else added.

“Beginners” was a throwback to the type of studio improvisation that had created the likes of “Heroes,” which suggests again that Bowie in his declining years needed to will himself into a state of determined, frenzied creativity before he could produce top-flight work. This arguably had been the case with Station to Station or Low too, but now it was ten years on from those records. Bowie was rich, unchallenged and at a loss of where to go. Then, in a pick-up session for an inconsequential film soundtrack, he managed a late lucky strike.

The song came out of a demo session for “That’s Motivation,” which Bowie cut with a band assembled by EMI A&R head Hugh Stanley Clarke, including Attractions’ keyboardist Steve Nieve, bassist Matthew Seligman (who’d worked with the Soft Boys and Thomas Dolby), drummer Neil Conti and guitarist Kevin Armstrong (Prefab Sprout), with Rick Wakeman subsequently doing piano overdubs.* Each musician only had been told they were supporting a “Mr. X” at Abbey Road. (Most of them knew who “X” was before they arrived, though. Conti had been given the tip that his employer “had a glass eye.”)

Quickly dispatching the “Motivation” demo (with which “Beginners” shares an opening guitar line), Bowie and the band had time left on the clock, so they began working on another piece Bowie was considering for the film. Fueled by a mix of cigarettes, Cuba Gold coffee and cocaine,** Bowie sketched out a few chords and lyric phrases, then led the band through the song as he was writing it. Building the song eight bars at a time, scribbling out the lyric in bursts, Bowie took cues from his players’ suggestions—a key change; an exuberant bassline courtesy of a beside-himself Seligman.

Playing the role of Eno to his new charges, Bowie offered suggestions like “think green” or “sound Brazilian.” According to Sandford’s bio, Bowie also kept the mood light with a few pantomimes, like filming an empty glass on the recording console or hanging a painting on the studio wall.

“Beginners” is structurally fairly standard. While solidly in D major, an early Amaj7 chord in place of an A adds a bit of tension (on “nothing”) as do a few later diversions—for instance, a C major subs for what should be a C# minor (on “I’m absolutely,” so brightening that declaration). Where the track’s most radical in its embrace of stasis, in its easy but steady momentum. Its two verses are far too long for a typical pop single: they’re 40 bars, each over a minute long, so even on the single edit the chorus doesn’t appear until two minutes into the track. And what a chorus, though: one of the great octave-spanning Bowie melodies, a worthy heir to “Lady Grinning Soul” and the second bridge on “Under Pressure.”

However, despite this, “Beginners” doesn’t seem to drag. If anything, there’s a sense of having enough room to spare—take the way Bowie will take his time on every phrase, often languidly singing a three-beat line over four bars. The song’s fluid, able to be extended and shortened at will without sacrificing its feel, as long as you cut to the meaty chorus ever so often. So there’s a five-minute single edit, the eight-minute “master” version on the soundtrack LP (and used for the video), the two-minute cut for Absolute Beginners‘ opening credits, the six-minute cut for the end titles. “Beginners” was easily extended by Don Weller’s saxophone solo and a Luis Jardem percussion breakdown;  it was just as easily compressed to a single verse/chorus.

When Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, who were producing the Absolute Beginners soundtrack, heard Bowie’s studio demo of “Beginners,” they were flummoxed, as they had no idea how to improve it. “We’ve been handed this one on a plate,” Langer recalled saying in the elevator afterwards (as per Buckley’s bio).

The main addition was fulfilling Bowie’s request for a backing singer “who sounds like a shopgirl.” Langer and Winstanley found the 22-year-old Janet Armstrong, whose vocal on “Absolute Beginners” was her first-ever professional studio session. (It’s yet another play on the title, as Bowie is duetting with a literal absolute beginner). Bowie’s lead vocal was cut during a freewheeling session in which he imitated Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and Bruce Springsteen—the tapes, sadly, haven’t been bootlegged.

“Beginners” (the instrumental “dub” mix, issued as the B-side, is a nice way to hear the intricacies of the backing track) is a collection of small pleasures—the way Nieve’s keyboards can sound like an accordion; Wakeman’s wry musings that become, during the chorus, a lovely embellishment on the vocal melody; the baritone-sax heavy horn section, which eventually takes up the “bom-bom-bahOOOH” vocal hook; the Jardim percussion break, capped off with what sounds like an analog attempt to match the Fairlight tom samples on Jan Hammer’s “Miami Vice” theme; Bowie and Armstrong’s last “true,” which they hold aloft as long as they can, then slowly bring it down to earth.

The song felt valedictory, like a last gift, and it was. “Beginners” marks the end of Bowie as a mass property (it’s arguably the most recent song that the average person knows of his), his final hour in the center. Now he begins a long journey that will lead him back to where he had started: on the margins.

Recorded June 1985 at Abbey Road Studios, London (with overdubs later in the year). Released March 1986 as Virgin VS 838 (#2 UK, #53 US). Performed during the Glass Spider tour, live for the BBC in 2000 (during this performance, Bowie raises his eyes to the sky while he sings “I absolutely love you,” and then mouths “thank you”—it seems like a prayer, but perhaps he was only acknowledging a vocal fan in the nosebleed seats) and as a duet with Gail Ann Dorsey on the Heathen tour of 2002.

* Wakeman added what he described as the “classical piano/ Rachmaninoff type stuff” in a much later mixing session, where he and Bowie (who had been neighbors in Switzerland) spent a few hours reminiscing.

**An apparent late-in-the-day indulgence, as it’s one of the last reported times Bowie used it.

Top: Michael Schmidt, from the Waffenruhe (“ceasefire”) series, Berlin, 1985-86.

Volare (Nel Blu Dipinto di Blu) (Domenico Modugno, Eurovision, 1958).
Volare (Dean Martin, 1958).
Volare (Bowie, 1985).

The world of Absolute Beginners is also the high tide of Italy’s cultural influence on British youth. The cliche of dolce far niente Italian life had allured Britons since the Renaissance, and now it helped that the Italians had been the inept junior partners of the Axis, so there were no hard feelings about air raids, for instance.

What Italian culture offered the postwar British was a readymade sense of style—hence the late Fifties vogue for coffee bars, Vespa and Lambretta scooters, tailor-made suits, Fellini films. Adopting Italian styles led directly to the Mods, as it offered the most appealing distance from the throwback “American” stylings of the great Mod rivals, the rockers.

Contemporary Italian pop music was part of the package. Domenico Modugno’s “Volare” (its official title was “Nel Blu Dipinto di Blu”), Italy’s entrant to the 1958 Eurovision competition, placed third at Eurovision but as compensation it became a worldwide hit, even reaching #1 in the US in the summer of 1958, with various covers, most notably Dean Martin’s, charting near-simultaneously.

Bowie’s cover (in Absolute Beginners, it’s heard only on the radio while his character, the ad man Vendice Partners, is driving around the lead, Colin) is impeccably sung, with Bowie handling the Italian lyric so well that perhaps he should’ve made an Italian version of “Heroes” rather than a French one. Bowie, like most interpreters, excised Modugno’s original weird opening, where he recalled a dream in which he painted his flesh blue and then soared off into the sky. The production is clean and sparkling, the bongo/marimba rhythms add a Brazilian flavor, the period guitar solo is executed perfectly. It’s prop-music.

Recorded June 1985 at Abbey Road Studios, London. Included only on the double-LP version and the CD issue of the Absolute Beginners soundtrack.

Top: Terry Gilliam, Brazil, 1985.

That’s Motivation.
That’s Motivation (film sequence).

In the mid-Eighties Bowie transferred his allegiance from David Mallet, who had directed most of his iconic videos, to Julien Temple. Temple was slightly younger, flashier, more ambitious, and Bowie enjoyed his energy, the sense of being part of a movement that would invigorate British film, a New New Wave (it didn’t quite turn out that way). Bowie and Temple would hang out at Bar Italia, indulging each other’s nostalgia—Bowie’s, for Swinging London; Temple’s, for the punk summer of 1976.

So when Temple decided to bring Colin MacInnes’ Absolute Beginners to the screen, Bowie wanted part of it. MacInnes’ 1959 novel was a herald of the Sixties: in part a British response to Catcher in the Rye, it was one of the first celebrations of the teenager. MacInnes was an odd prophet of the youth explosion, as he was 45 when he wrote the novel (part of a loose trilogy that also included City of Spades and Mr. Love and Justice). But he had been a determined outsider all of his life, a bisexual whose allegiances lay with society’s misfits and outcasts. The Absolute Beginners trilogy is an ode to immigrant London, with MacInnes regarding African and West Indian immigrants as Britain’s saviors, the New Britons with style and soul. At the end of Absolute Beginners, the narrator, ready to emigrate in disillusionment, is stopped in his tracks by seeing a group of African immigrants disembarking an airplane. (“I shouted out above the engines, ‘Welcome to London! Greetings from England! Meet your first teenager!”)

But MacInnes had fallen into the same hole as Norman Mailer, prizing Africans and West Indians for their “realness,” and abstracting them in his own way as much as any bigot. For example, here’s his “A Short Guide for Jumbles (to the Life of their Coloured Brethren in England)” (1956): Do Africans not like us then? Not very much, because our outstanding characteristics of reliability and calm don’t touch them, and we lack the spontaneity and sociability they prize.” By contrast, white Britain was “The ‘Express’ Families” of MacInnes’ 1960 essay: “sexless sparrows in their suburban love-nest…outside their world of consecrated mediocrity, nothing exists whatsoever.”

Temple’s adaptation could have made much of this, viewing this condescending utopian dream of an alliance between blacks and British hipsters from the perspective of a post-Brixton London, but instead he downplayed that aspect of the novel, even as a satire. While climaxing the film with a West Side Story version of the Notting Hill race riots of 1958 (complete with a new Jerry Dammers track), Temple’s interests lay more in showing the scaffolding of Modernity Britain being assembled.

Bowie, asked by Temple to do a theme song for his adaptation, offered to play a role as well, and wound up as Vendice Partners, a Satanic ad man with a wavering American accent.* Bowie’s Partners is the distillation of his time: Vespa scooters, E-type Jaguars, streamlined Italian suits (as Bowie’s biographer Christopher Sandford noted, it was “poignantly, the world of Terry Burns,” Bowie’s elder half-brother, who had killed himself in early 1985). Partners was also Bowie’s long-stewed revenge on the ad industry, in which he had dabbled as a teenager to support himself, and a winking acknowledgment that youth culture had been compromised, sold out and repackaged while it was still in the cradle.

What was intended as a small-scale genre picture, a witty tribute to the dawn of the Sixties by its veterans (Ray Davies also has a minor role, singing his best song of the Eighties), instead became the center of colossal expectations. Absolute Beginners would save the ailing British film industry, it would launch a new generation of stars (Temple’s lead actress was the 17-year-old Patsy Kensit, who had recently been quoted saying “all I want is to be more famous than anything or anyone’”), it would revive the musical, it would make millions, it would be revolutionary. Naturally, the UK press hated it before primary shooting was completed. Partly intended as a critique of Thatcherism, the film’s aspirational feel, its rapidly-ballooning budget, its overinflated expectations and its flash barely masking a shoddiness, marked it instead as a pure product of its time.

The film also seemed cursed. London’s rain-plagued summer of 1985 meant that location shots had to keep being postponed. A set caught fire. Most of the cast took ill, some with pneumonia. When Absolute Beginners finally premiered in March 1986, it had been debated, belittled and gossiped about for so long that its actual debut seemed like old news. The film was reviewed modestly, sold modestly, and faded away. As Nicholas Pegg wrote, “it’s still regarded today as some sort of grand folly, often by people who’ve never seen it.“

“That’s Motivation” was the first song that Bowie wrote for the film, and it would serve as his character’s major set piece. It’s a seduction song, with Partners corrupting the teenage Colin with a philosophy summed up in Alan Sinfield’s comment on MacInnes’ novel: “If you listen to jazz, dress snappily and stay cool, then the rest of it needn’t bother you.”

That said, “Motivation” is a pretty weak song, its horn-driven beat a melange of Irving Berlin’s “Heat Wave” and “The Name Game,” while Bowie’s lyric throws in Sixties references (Far From the Madding Crowd) and recently-used creaky imagery (the bloody skies of “This Is Not America” are back). The need to extend the song to fit in assorted set pieces (the dance on the giant typewriter (inspired by Ready, Willing and Able), the Great Dictator-referencing globe scene, the tap-dancing on TV, the Seven Deadly Sins count-down**) means that “Motivation” feels like it goes on forever, especially when it’s stuck in one of its nearly amelodic bridges. Still, the studio band assembled for the soundtrack are sharp (including Elvis Costello’s pianist Steve Nieve) and the song does what it needs to do—it’s a secondary color for an overly ambitious film sequence.

Recorded June 1985, Abbey Road Studios, London. Released April 1986 on the Absolute Beginners OST (Virgin V 2386/EMI America SV 171-82).

* A deliberate move by Bowie, and one reflecting MacInnes’ essay “Young English, Half English” (1957), about Tommy Steele: “[when Steele] speaks to his admirers between the songs, his voice takes on the flat, wise, dryly comical tones of purest Bermondsey. When he sings, the words (where intelligible) are intoned in the shrill international American-style drone.”

**A pedantic footnote. Bowie’s recounting of the Seven Deadly Sins mistakenly uses jealousy instead of envy, but there’s a subtle difference between the two.

Top: “The Only Hell My Momma Ever Raised,” “KittyKat Theatre,” NYC, July 1985.

This Is Not America (Bowie and the Pat Metheny Group).
Chris (This Is Not America) (Pat Metheny Group, 1985).
This Is Not America (Pat Metheny Group, live, 1995).
This Is Not America (Bowie, broadcast, 2000).
This Is Not America (Bowie, live, 2000).
American Dream (P. Diddy with Bowie, 2001).
This Is Not America (Pat Metheny Group and Anna Maria Jopek, 2002).
This Is Not America (Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, 2005).

As soon as he was done with Tonight, Bowie seemed to regret having made it. He all but apologized for the record* in interviews, and he had no intention of touring to promote it. He was in a trough; he tried to haul himself out of it through soundtrack work.

Bowie had only written the quarter-baked “Revolutionary Song” for Just a Gigolo and the scrapped soundtrack to Man Who Fell to Earth. Now, rather suddenly, he became a minor soundtrack regular in the mid-Eighties, writing and performing songs for four films, two of which he also acted in. A couple of these songs were some of his best material of the decade. It’s as though Bowie found a measure of inspiration in contract work. Given a plotline to work with, a lyrical cue or an incidental music requirement, he was briefly free from his inertia.

The first of these songs, “This Is Not America,” recorded with the Pat Metheny Group in late 1984, was written for the John Schlesinger film The Falcon and the Snowman, about two upper-class kids from California who committed espionage in the mid-Seventies. Christopher Boyce (Timothy Hutton), a CIA contractor disgusted by his employer—the final break came when he discovered that the CIA had helped cause the downfall of Australia’s Labor Party government in 1975—began passing on secrets to the Soviets. Boyce’s go-between was his boyhood friend Andrew Daulton Lee (Sean Penn), an addict who figured treason was an efficient way to get his cocaine money. They were arrested in 1977. However, as though sent back for revisions by a producer, Boyce’s story grew ever more bizarre. He escaped from prison in 1980, became a bank robber for a time, and intended to fly to the Soviet Union to join the Red Army until he was arrested again in 1981 (both he and Lee have since been paroled).

Falcon was a somber anomaly at the height of the Reagan years, when many films were refighting Vietnam (spoiler: this time, We Win), fervidly imagining Soviet or terrorist invasions of the heartland, or equating the Grenada invasion with Korea and Vietnam. Akin to the weary spymastering of John LeCarre’s Smiley novels, Falcon is a pair of jaded innocents bungling things abroad, two pawns given a few spaces of movement on the board before being swept off. Hutton’s Boyce is an idealist as well as something of a pompous fool; Penn’s Lee is a wretched user whose comeuppance at the hand of the Mexican police is awful and tragic.

John Schlesinger had helped invent Swinging Britain with Billy Liar and Darling and packed it off with Sunday Bloody Sunday. His subsequent work in the US coarsened him, with the gritty promise of Midnight Cowboy devolving into the exploitative dreck of Marathon Man in less than a decade. Falcon, Schlesinger’s last major film, seems like his last thoughts on the Sixties, the bombast and heroics of the decade reduced to the doings of two sad dupes, consumed and deluded by ideology or addiction, used and discarded by all sides. It offers no sense of liberation: the hero of the film is a traitor; his actions, while driven by moral outrage, damage no one in power, just other pawns.

How Bowie and Pat Metheny came to work together on Falcon‘s soundtrack is a bit of a mystery. None of the Bowie biographies offer anything on it, as most dismiss “This Is Not America” in a sentence, if not ignoring it entirely. I assume the collaboration was likely EMI’s doing, the label figuring Bowie could add pop appeal to an otherwise ambient/jazz fusion soundtrack that wasn’t going to rival Beverly Hills Cop‘s in terms of sales.

Perhaps working with a jazz quartet intrigued Bowie, who hadn’t tried his hand at jazz since “Good Morning Girl.” That said, “This Is Not America” isn’t jazz at all—there are no improvisations; Metheny plays rhythm guitar for the entire track, never soloing even in the long outro. The piece is a closed circuit: it’s built primarily on a repeating four-chord sequence (originally Gm-Dm/F-Ebmaj7-Dm/F, or I-IV-VImaj7-IV) with a constant rhythmic pulse courtesy of Metheny’s drummer Paul Wertico. Synthesizer motifs appear throughout: a rise-and-fall fanfare, a somber French horn-sounding counter-melody that begins in the second verse. Metheny said at the time that he intended the track to be mainstream: “It was the first time the group really committed itself to doing a real pop record,” he told Billboard.

Metheny and his keyboardist Lyle Mays had written a piece called “Chris” for the Falcon soundtrack, a tone poem for Hutton’s character. This served as the basic track for which Bowie wrote a lyric,** set to the perspective of the disillusioned Boyce. Bowie’s lyric has its faults: the apparent need to include the film title at some point leads to the leaden doom-laden lines about the falcon spiraling and the snowman melting, while the homophone rhymes of “piece” and “peace,” and, more thuddingly, the near-homophone “America” and “a miracle” (done already by Culture Club) are a bit creaky.

Still his vocal is one of his finest of the era: the way Bowie quietly twists and reshapes his phrasing of “America” in its various repeats; the descending phrases to match lyrical depictions of decay (blossoms failing to bloom, falcons tumbling); his fine, eerie singing on the bridge—the octave leap on “was a TIME,” the run of high Gs and As on “blew so pure.” (There’s a touch of Donald Fagen on “faintest idea“). Bowie deftly handles the jarring key change after the first bridge (to G-sharp minor), a move that puts an edge into the song but also seems like the composers forcing the drama a bit. The problem is that once the key change happens, the song doesn’t go anywhere new, settling into a repeat of the first verse and the entire bridge, plus a minute’s worth of outro. When he performed it live years later, Bowie wisely moved the change to the song’s climax.

The hook—the repeated refrain “this is not America”—is all the drama the song needed, as Bowie begins by softly reinforcing the declarations of his backing singers and eventually makes “this is not America” a mournful, wounding statement in its closing repetitions. There’s a world, an empty generation, within the words, their open accusation. Packaged in a quiet, near-Muzak setting, “This Is Not America” briefly hung in the air in the mid-Eighties, a hummable curse for an unsubtle time, offering no solutions, only one concrete statement: that we live in a fiction.

Released in conjunction with Falcon in January 1985, “This Is Not America” proved a minor hit for Bowie, having the greatest popularity in Western Europe (the Dutch and Germans especially loved it). Forgotten soon afterward, “America” was revived in 2000 for a Bowie BBC appearance. With the song removed from the synthetic precision of Metheny’s arrangement and Bob Clearmountain’s mix, it took on a bit of color, with Bowie playing up the song’s dramatics.

With the election of George W. Bush, the song’s title was irresistible, and it was soon used for blunt ends: P. Diddy, shaken out of his torpor to record a pissed-off rap, “American Dream,” for the film Training Day, sampled “This Is Not America,” with Bowie providing new vocals. The best of the latter-day covers was Charlie Haden’s, who in 2005 made “This Is Not America” a romp, a joyous collaboration that seems set out to disprove the song’s title: Haden’s version is America on one of its better, chaotic days.

Recorded ca. November 1984, Montreux, Switzerland (the backing track was likely cut in London, in September ’84). Released January 1985 as EMI America 190 (#14 UK, #32 US, #1 in Holland) and also on The Falcon and the Snowman OST (EMI America SV 17150).

* After Tonight, Hugh Padgham went to London to record Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required. What’s striking about NJR (which I just listened to for the first time in probably 25 years) is how much it’s a successful revision of Tonight: it has a similar sound, similar vocal treatments, rhythm guitar work that seems like Carlos Alomar outtakes, similar horn arrangements (the “Phoenix Horns” here, rather than the Borneos), Arif Martin string arrangements. But NJR works far better, as it has an internal consistency—its uptempo irritating singles are embedded within a wider set of gloomy pieces, making the former seem like manic flights in a depressive’s journal.

** It was still novel for Bowie to write a lyric for another’s music:  he had hardly done so in his life (see “Pancho”, “Even a Fool Learns to Love” and “Music Is Lethal”/”Hey Ma, Get Papa”).

Top: Ray Mortenson, “Untitled,” South Bronx, NYC, 1983; Christopher Boyce’s second arrest, 1981.