Capital Radio 14th May 1979 transcription

[Halloweenjack84]

Found this little transcription of Bowie appearing on Capital Radio on 14.05.79 for two hours being interviewed by 12 Bowie fans as he played Lodger for the first time in one of my fanzines.

Thought that maybe one or two Bowie fans would like to read it?

As it's two hours long,it's a bit of a long read,so I'll just post part one just now,where they just play random Bowie songs and have a random conversation,then when I have the time I'll post part two where they play and discuss Lodger.

As the original transcription had loads of spelling and grammar mistakes,and my scanning software struggled because it was printed poorly on pink paper and so added more,please don't hold moi accountable for all the errors.
And also funny things happen when copying the text to this forum.

I tried to fix most but gave up,as it was too much like hard work,so just fix them in your head as you read.

Hope some find it of interest?

Jack






CAPITAL RADIO May 14th 1979


Capital Radio is proud to present conversations with Bowie.
12 Capital listeners talking freely to David Bowie.



D.B. What I really wanted to do I thought, I must start doing this a lot more in the future,when I talk to press people I don't get the same kinds of questions as I get from the people who come to see the shows and buy the albums and things,so I thought that publicly, it might be better if I get a reaction from the people who are actually involved in what I'm doing and not earning their money as reviewers or critics or whatever.
And I’ll probably get more evil questions.(laughs)

So does anybody wanna start anywhere?

Fan. Eel Pie Island.

D.B. Fine,okay .. lets start with Eel Pie Island.
Is it still there? I don’t even know if it's still running.

Fan. What do you remember most of 67/68?

D.B. Well, what I really remember I think is I had a buddy called George Underwood who was,who is in fact a painter.
He did the back painting for,lord which album was it?

Fan. Hunky Dory

D.B. No no it was before that,the first one that came out on Mercury.
I can’t remember what it was called?
I think it was David Bowie (laughs) highly original.
It was the one with Space Oddity on,and he did that very convoluted painting that was on the other side of it.He and I used to be the class mods and we'd go to Eel Pie Island,actually more than Eel Pie.We went up there to see? Who did we go and see there? I think it was the Yardbirds we used to go and see, no it wasn't it was Gary Parr and The T Bones.The T Bones were playing there.No oh ah ah it was The Tridents.The Tridents.Jeff Back's three piece band.

Fan. After The Yardbirds?

D.B. No before! Yeah I'm probably a little older than you,and we used to go and see The Tridents but I think we spent most of the time up the A A ground.

Fan. What sort of scooters?

D.B. We were too young to ride ‘em. (Laughs) No we probably weren't um no we used to get the milk train up and back down to where we were living at the time,which was down in Bromley, and we'd take the train and buses and stuff and the subway, underground subway, sorry and we used to go down to the AA ground in Richmond) that was our favourite.
That was to see Gary Farr and The T Bones, I Found it very exciting for us because it really was a micro society down there,quite radical.
Once you got across that bridge you were in another world.
I don't think I found that since then.That kind of feeling.
I don't know, I went to a pub the other week and I wish I could remember what it was called? In London where a band called the Human League were working.I don't know If anybody knows The Human League?

Fan. Yeah!

D.B. I rather like them. I thought they were a quite interesting band and I found something like the same kind of thing happening then.

Fan. How do you get out without being recognised to things like this?

D.B. I cut me head off! (laughs) No I found it quite easy in London,it’s I think,if you were something extraordinary then you’re walking along the street and people look at the extraordinary thing and they don’t bother to look at the face behind it,so I wear silly sunglasses or something.
I've got old womens ones with diamantes on or something so by the time you've gone it’s only the diamantes glasses they’ve seen so I can get about like that.

Fan. Are you called a punk rocker by doing that?

D.B. No I just get called a burke.(laughs)

FAME

D.B. I've never been called a punk rocker.
I’ll regret that to my dying day.

Fan. Do you like punk rock?

D.B. Did I like?
Did I like punk rock? Wonderful stuff!
Well I think we're in the era of the PP post punk um ..yes,no like it,no I don' t think I can apply like to very much.
Like is something I can apply to things that don't require much in the way of attention.There's some painters that I like,Constable and Turner.And people that I like because they don't demand anything of one but if you get somebody like any of the expressionist painters,the Germans somebody like Heckle or Egon Schielle,you can't say that you like his stuff but it’s incrediblydemanding,which for me makes it completely valid.
It was an enema,actually,it was exactly what was needed.

Fan. What happened about your film about Egon Schielle?

D.B. It's under this cushion somewhere!
I don't know if it's going to see the light of day.I've been through three,nigh on four scripts for it now and frankly they've all been written by East Europeans or Germans and there's something wanting in the translation.I've not found the power of character that I would expect from a draught of Egon Schielle.
I’m not satisfied with the scripts yet.
I'm waiting for the right script.
I don't know who could write it.

Fan. Would you be doing the whole of his life?

D.B. There wasn't much of it was there?
I guess(laughs)I’m gonna find the crib scenes very awkward.
I think probably just the formative years with Gustava Klimpt.
From that period to his death would be the area I'd like to indulge myself in.

Fan. When are you going to start directing films?

D.B. Oh I do every night!
I've directed so many films,but in reality,well I don't know.
I've had two pieces of advice..
One from a very good friend of mine who said I should plunge into it immediately into the deep end and go in for a full scale thing and another person whom i also admire very much who said it would just be a waste of time and that i really shouldn’t bother.
So I've got two attitudes to choose from.

Fan. Are you thinking of doing a musical?

D.B. I think that’s far more likely in the interim period.
Yes I think it quite likely.I would like to do something that's devastatingly exciting and dangerous on stage when I don't think I've ever done anything that dangerous on stage.I mean dangerous in theatric terms.Most of what i’ve done has been a reorganisation of things that have gone before,nothing very original in what I did,just probably the attitude was different and the intention was different,but the artefacts and the way of performance were pretty standard,from different aspects of theatre all over the world and out of different times,the eclectic sort of gathering of those things that made it unusual,but i would like to do something rivetingly new and earth shattering.
Every Saturday I want to do that.
Lets do something earth shattering,no let's put on the telly.


SPACE ODDITY

D.B. Do you know I find earth far more exciting the more I sort of travel but you learn even less the more you travel,you really do learn less about er um.It's like going through a door leading to another room with two doors and you've got a choice of one of those two and you take one door and the next room has three doors and it just sort of gets bigger and bigger,the world gets bigger the more that you see of it.
And I think I am one of the few people who appreciates the things that we can learn from travelling into space,and I don't think that we're wasting money by putting space crafts up into the cosmos.
I think it does bring beneficial things back to earth.I think the use of metals and the kinds of X-rays and photography matter that are used in space,that are only developed for space,when it's applied to things back on earth can help us immensely so I appreciate the use of the poor old astronaut,but I don't think I'd want to be one of them.

Fan. Surely you’re into metaphysical science?

D.B. Yes,but,yes but in a humdrum manner.I'm not a science fiction fan really I always used outerspace as a representative of my inner space.It just seemed amusing using the hardware of space travel and the unfortunate circumstances it can bring up,summon up.
I felt was an apt way of describing the inside of my mind.
There's a strange theory.

Fan. Have you heard of J.G. Ballard?

D.B. Yes I know Ballard but they're not riveting reading that one would(Dog whines)I know it's a bore darling.
He's remembering that bone shot in 2001.
What a waste of a bone God.(Laughter)

JEAN GENIE

Fan. Is is true you were nearly poisoned during the making of The Man Who Fell To Earth?

D.B . I’ll never be sure.
Yes.yes something did happen there,there’s a quantum leap.
Well what happened was there was a glass of milk and I was drinking it and there was this terrible brown stuff in the bottom.

Fan. Golden liquid?

D.B. You're right it was golden brown.
A number of things happened on that location in fact.
That wasn't the only thing that happened.

I sort of,I don’t know If it was paranoia or what but I immediately felt very strange as soon as I drunk the milk.I only saw the stuff as I sort of finished and everything started flashing up very hot and my heart started going.That sounds like paranoia to me.I think it probably was.I took one of those powder things that make you throw up immediately and I thought “this is the end,this is definitely it, definitely is!
Nick will have to find a stand in for the rest of the film.”
There were a number of accidents on that particular location and I presume that it was because we were working on an old Indian burial site.
We also had an invasion by the local Hell’s Angels.
They started circling.We were right out in the middle of the desert.

Fan. Mexican ones?

D.B. I didn’t really have time to enquire into their background,but they had leather jackets on.
That was enough,I didn’t really care if they were Mexican or Eskimo.

Fan. Did they have sombreros?

D.B. Sombreros ha ha. But they were sort of going round ,they circled us for a. long time and were sort of threatening to do us physical violence but as the evening came on I think they got too drunk to bother about that.

Fan. You’ve got plenty of people to protect you?

D.B. Well they fell off their bikes and just ended up having a camp fire.

Fan. Before you actually started making films did somebody come up to you and say "you can act", or did you go up to someone and say, "I bet I can act", or did someone come up to you and say, '''I'm sure you can if you try”?

D.B. No it wasn't quite like that.
Nick sort of said, ''David I’d like to put you in a film.” Which is a sort of enigmatic kind of statement at best and doesn't give one much courage. He didn't say "you can act" - I didn't say I think I can act.He said "I'm going to put you in a film", and that's what he did.
Whether acting comes into it I've never been quite sure, I've got very little faith in myself as an actor.I've got a lot of faith in myself as a director, because I haven't done it of course.
You always have incredible faith in something you've never done, well I do.
Whatever it is, if I haven't done it, I know I'm going to be qreat at it and then I do it and I think, "Oh why did I start ?

Fan. Were you worried,when you’d never actually acted on film before which would have been shown in the West End? Do You think like Just A Gigolo that this film is gonna be shown?
0K They're not here now but they will see it,

D.B. It actually was shown wasn't it, Gigolo?

Fan. Do you think never mind what they think at the end I'll just do my best now or do you think what are they going to think at the end?

D.B. With Nick it was definitely a question of working with him.I mean he's an extraordinary interesting man and there's something so intuitive and demonic about him that you really want to understand how he works. So I think I spent a lot of the time just watching him,and studying him.
Not terribly concerned with my character because it was,he wanted me to underplay the whole thing so desperately because Jerome Newton had very little possibility of showing any sort of real emotion so it required a sort of detached performance which I'm excellent at. Proved time after time a reasonable detached performance, so I was less concerned with my performance.
I must admit then in watching Nick work.

SOUND AND VISION

Fan.This isn't cruel it's a question I would ask anybody.
Do you think you can act?

D.B Ask anybody? Would you ask your mother that question?

Fan. My mother isn't in films. Is that the courage you get to go ahead and make a film that will be shown?
Do you say “I can act” or “oh God I hope I can act?”.

D.B. No not really,no.

Fan. A lot of your albums you criticise

D.B. I think the two questions can be tied together. I can get involved in something and the end product is called music. I've never been convinced that I'm a musician I like putting together interesting ideas and see how they stir them up and see how they come out, the same applies to acting or doing a film role. I do a film role and there'll be a performance of sorts that will come out of it but it's certainly not up to me to decide whether it's acting or not.

D.B. Every time I finish an album I think oh God I can't stand this any more, I've got absolutely nothing to contribute. It's no good.All hell has broken loose in my mind, completely illogical about the whole thing and I just crawl up and die for a couple of weeks after making it.

Fan. Why?

D.B.I don't know it's always been like that with me.
There's not one album that I've made that I've walked happily away from and sort of gone about my business

Fan. I thought you did it for your own pleasure.

D.B. Oh none of it's pleasure anymore.It started off not as pleasure and it's now still not pleasure.

Fan. Why do you do it?

Fan. Why don’t you do the things you want?

D.B. I've got to do it, no I've got to do it.
I've got to do it.

Fan. Why, if you don't enjoy it? I wouldn't do it!

D.B. Enjoyment

Fan. YOU have to enjoy it to a certain extent?

D.B. No not really I don't enjoy painting but I really have to paint.

Fan. What do you enjoy doing?

D.B. Umm that's a very difficult question.
"What do I enjoy doing?

Fan. What could you be happy doing?

D.B. Happy?
You know how you have to sneeze? I mean in the creation of the sneeze there's a sort of perverse enjoyment of it.
Well it's sort of like that with me.

Fan. Was that an original or did you borrow it?

D.B. What,that analogy, it's as far as I'm aware completely,instantaneous,spontaneous and original.

Yes that was an original.

[Halloweenjack84]

Oops!

Only posted the first part of the first hour (told you it was long)

Here's the remaining part.

Jack




Fan. Can I ask you a question David, about something which I found quite endearing.You had quite a great joy in a particular sound in a strange insane way.
In a strange. Insane way.

D.B. : Yes.

Fan. Could you tell me something about that?

D.B. Syd Barrett,crazy Syd Barrett had a lot to do with that.
What I was impressed with,with that particular thing that was happening.There were a pile of art school bands.Pink Floyd were dominant at the time and it was playing modern music with a London accent,which of course carried through into punk music.
Of course there's a return to a London accent, and the only person who impressed me before because they had the guts to use a London accent was Tony Newley and I sort of had this hey-day of thinking, I'm gonna be a rock Tony Newley, that's what I wanna do.

Fan. Was it the song about the little man, little gnome wasn't it?

D.B. Yes. I still love that.

Fan. I won £5 on that.

D.B. Did you?

Fan. My friend thought you were Tony Newley and I knew you weren't, so I bet him £5.

D.B. DO vou know I knew I wasn't as well.

LAUGHING GNOME

D.B. I was actually thinking of doing Laughing Gnome as an encore on one show, which I felt would be a fun thing to do.

Fan. That could have been re-released and you’d have hated it.

D.B. Yeah.

Fan. Yeah but you would have done it anyway.

D.B. I did hate it for an awful long time because I felt it was a tremendous embarassment, but then it got back to me only through my kid and he started.
You know he's not particularly bothered about anything I do in the way of writing.
You know,he likes Elvis...

Fan. Which one?

D.B. The older chap. And it was him that brought me back to it.
I'd actually done something my family enjoyed.
So now I can quite happily listen to it.

Fan. But is there anything if somebody said to you go and sing that,you'd say “Oh my God no!”

D.B. I think in actual performance no, otherwise I wouldn't put it in the show. I only put things into the show that I do that I actually enjoy performing.
I loathe performing after about ten shows, I find it the ultimate bore.

Fan. You've said this time and again, but surely it's your fans who are keeping you going and they like seeing you performing.

D.B. That's a difficult thing to answer.

Fan. Why do you leave London to the end of each tour?

D.B. Why?

Fan. Yes obviously if you say that you really hate it by then.

D.B. London is a good way to finish,because at least it's sort of back home again, I like it and it gives it an inspired last fling you know, but the majority of the time I really find it
tremendously boring, after about 10 or 15 shows.It really is.

Fan. Your next show is 2 years away.

D.B. That's right,I'd push it to 3 if I could. (Laughs)

WARSZAWA

D.B. I think if an artist is an artist he's an artist, then he should be able to apply himself to anything that is immediate whatever it is and have some kind of intention behind it.

Fan. That goes to something of great interest to me. I've always viewed you as a master of words and secondly a master of music presenting stuff that no one else would present. You've done it consistently well for ten years but it distresses me to a certain extent that Low was purely instrumental on the second side (D.B. Yeah) and I'm ultimately pleased that what we're gonna hear isn't and secondly (D.B. Damn) that you are now going into things like painting which on the flip I've got no training in and no eye for it and it throws me completely that you're moving into something I can't follow.

D.B. Kirkegarde was a painter,

Fan. Ah well you've got me there I didn't know that,

D.B. (sings badly)’Painter man, painter man’.

Fan. Do you do a bit of decorating these days?

D.B. I've done many a flat.

Fan. Music is only an extention of hearing.

D.B. Let's throw this one out.

D.B. OK in which case i'm for the art.

Fan. OK you're for the art, fine.I'm much more that what I'm getting out of David's music is firstly what he's doing is impressive secondly it's tied in so much to what is going on at the same time in my life.
If I’m going out with a certain girl at a certain time the trees happen to be blossoming in April when this great album comes out,then everytime I hear that album in November then the trees will be blossoming in November.

D.B. Well in fact you've been appreciating, thank you very much, in my music is is fact a painter's attitude to music. Really because I made no secrect of the fact that I've never considered myself as a musician, but more of a painter who didn't like his paintings very much and tried to apply the same technique to music of building up layers and then having built something up wiped something out and so there are bits underneath that are missing. I've always worked as a painter in music.

HEROES

D.B, Yes I think it's a very successful album.
I liked “Heroes” an awful lot, I really did, really did.
That one and Diamond Dogs.Yes, I think that Diamond Dogs also has that same quality of putting quite, at the time irrelevant things together.It now sounds quite relevant as a piece.

Fan. How did you go about writing Sweet Thing?That's one of my favourite tracks and it seems so completely different from anything.

D.B. That was totally cut-up.It was a cut-up. I took The Third Man story and paragraphed it out, had a quick sort of précis of what the story was about. Then I also did a little story about street hustlers in another paragraph and then there was the third and fourth elements, the last two I can't remember what they were.Then I cut them up into four five word pieces, put them in the old proverbial hat and started to just bring them out.

SWEET THING

D.B. William Burroughs applied it to his actual writing but in fact the system was intimated to him by a guy called Brion Gysin who also invented the Incredible Light Machine. A very strange object that was on a sort of gramophone wheel and it just went round and round and you went on a trip just by lights. Lights and geometry, quite extraordinary thing, he did that way back in the “60's. He's been a very responsible man, Brion Gysin.He's done some incredible things, applying the same idea of cut-up to tape recorders. He suggests kids should take tape recorders to school and record their masters in 5 second spurts off and on all the time and then take it home and listen to what the lesson was really about.
Some very nice sort of subversive stuff like that.
He's a whizz,he really is.

Fan. When you recorded Young Americans you said in an interview you sat and listened to the radio in America and taped it to come up with the concept for the album.If you were gonna do that now, now you've finished this album (D.B, Yeah) you'll be making another album (D.B. Yeah) If you sat and taped the radio say in London. What do you think you'd come up with as a concept?

D.B. Certainly depends what station I'm listening to.
Now if I was listening to Capital. I'd come up with a damn fine album.
(Nicky Horne- I'll pay you later)
I don't think I would do that any more, I think I work in a different way.

Fan. Just say.

D.B. Just pretend I did.

Fan. But what you if had no other ideas at all and you had to fall back on that?

D.B. I don’t think what I'd do when I'm at a point of desperation and I don't quite know what I’d want to do.One of the most absurd things I used to do,and quite again, perversely enjoy, was reading people's ideas of what I was, or what I'd been doing and then picking out the most absurd statements that people said about me, I'd then apply it.I'd read that I wear blue hats only and leave out all verbs when I talk and I'll take that and I'll do it.I’d start wearing blue hats and leave out all verbs when I talk, the sort of self-invented man approach but by letting other people do the invention for me.I've always enjoyed an honest secret,I don't know if it's secret, I think I once told somebody that I actually really didn't know much about Lou Reed, until people started writing that I was obviously influenced by Lou Reed, so I said OK I'll say that, then I started going around saying Lou Reed was my Chuck Berry, actually not knowing very much about him.So I started listening to him to know what I was supposed to be talking about and then that stuck and that produced something that I would not have done had I not sort of just taken up somebody elses offer of a character.
Somebody offered me a character,that I was influenced by Lou Reed.
OK let's be influenced by Lou Reed.
I think that can create some interesting situations.
It can also go hellishly wrong.

STATION TO STATION

Fan You haven't mentioned audiences very much. Do you bother about what people think?

D.B. No. I'm not very good with audiences. There was a period when I really felt part of my audience. I think that happens to most artists when they're new, when they first start I think there's an incredible empathy with the rising artist and his audience. One does sort of lose that responsible attitude. I'm not close to my audiences at all, I mean I often feel that I'm incredibly rude to them and very off hand about them in some respects and I'm truly suprised when they keep sort of turning up. I mean that's great, that's fine but I really do wish to get on with what I'm doing. If I have an audience then I’m fortunate, if I don't have an audience then, one, I'm not a successful artist because a successful artist is one who does communicate something, I don't think he has to know his audience though, but I will not be dictated to by a lump of people, a big sort of contingent because I can only see them in those terms. I can see you as people of course because we're talking, we've been introduced to each other and whatever, but I can't possibly envisage how an audience thinks.

Fan. Could you tell what kind of people we were from reading our poems?

D.B. Absolutely not!

Fan. You didn't have a clue what we'd be like?

D.B. No! I was terrified.

Fan. What are we like?

D.B. Bit like me really.

[mattday]

Thats great thanks HJ, cool, i have listened to this and would have been great to be there oh yes

[Halloweenjack84]

Pt 2.

Again I corrected as many spelling and grammar mistakes as I could then fell into a comma,so any left are not mine.

Again a bit long but you can read it at your leisure over the next week or two.

Jack






And now part two of conversations with David Bowie.

12 Capital listeners listening to and discussing Bowie's new album LODGER.

FANTASTIC VOYAGE

Fan. That was great.

D.B. Well that is definitely pop!

Fan. Yeah we vote that a hit.

D.B. Oh God this is painful.
What’s interesting about that one, okay is it's a piece of music that the chords were.. we played the same chord sequences four different ways and the same thing exactly occurs elsewhere on the album and you've gotta spot it.(laughs)
It’s quite interesting.

Fan. What was that called?

D.B. Fantastic Voyage.
I wanted to put some sort of point of view forward that was in the narrative fashion right at the front of the album.It sort of starts veering off to the obscure after this. That was a pretty straight forward thing about how I think I feel or start to feel now.
In a very old fashioned romantic fashion.

Fan. A lot happier than your last record.

D.B. That wasn't happy at all.(laughs)

Fan. How did you write it though?

D.B. Actually it's very straight forward that one feels constantly that so many things are out of our own control and it's just this infuriating thing that you don't want to
have their depression ruling, or the depression that they're causing ruling your life or sort of dictating how you will wake up each morning.
You know it's really a straight forward song I think on that level.

Fan. Yeah can you listen to it objectively, not as the performer?

D.B. Now I can yeah yeah.

Fan. Do you think the genuine feelings you are putting are opposed to the feeling of the music.

D.B. I think so.

Fan. As something you've got to say ‘cause you've got an album to make.

D.B. It's quite subjective, in areas, it really is.

Fan. Do you think people get, say, a third of as much out of your albums as you put in?
As much as you intend them to get out?

D.B. I said I told a little anecdote over here a few minutes ago, that I will repeat actually because it's quite important.
Well I think it applies to this.
There was a critic interviewing Antonioni about one of his films, and the critic was saying, "you had a white wall and a woman walking past, now were you intending us to feel that the white wall was, in fact the arms of Jesus Christ on the cross, and the woman walking past with a loaf of bread was the unfortunate and depressed Mary Magdolin?"
And Antonioni said, "no actually I looked through the camera and saw a white wall which I thought was quite attractive and Sophia Loren had to go past with a loaf of bread.
She played a hungry woman.”
How he said that I think is that real statement made is somewhere between the two things that we've just said and I think that very much applies to my work, that often I will have one intention but it will be received in a completely different way but it does lie somewhere in between.
It fluctuates between the two somewhere.

AFRICAN NIGHT FLIGHT

D.B. You will all of course note the use of Swahili.
Translated that meant hello goodbye.

I’m sure you're familar with that.(laughs)

Fan. Great, it really was.
We loved that. I thought that was the best bit.

D.B. What the Swahili?
That sort of came together because in Kenya, especially in Mombasa in many of the bars there you find these old um a lot of German ex-pilots who sort of hang out in the bars and they're still sort of wearing most of their pilot gear and they're always talking that they've really been here for 17 years and they really must go. (laugh)
And you don't sort of know why they are there?
You've got a good idea why they went to Kenya in the first place, but they've sort of lived this strange life and they're flying around in tiny little Cessnas and things you know over the bush land doing all kinds of strange things and they are very mysterious characters, permanently plastered and always talking about when they're going to leave and go back to Germany and that was sort of how it came about.
Wondering exactly what they are and what they're doing there, and what is their profession.
Exactly who do they fly around for ‘cause they're not.. they don't belong to any tourist agencies or anything.

Fan. You've just explained these two tracks to us now after hearing them and a little bit before. When you start recording them with the people you are recording with (D.B. yeah) Do you explain it to them, or do you just say right this is how we're gonna do it?

D.B. Well, this one, this one was very interesting. What we did was we took the basic idea of Susie Q, reversed it, and sort of played the idea of Susie Q backwards, and then Brian decided to put prepared piano on it, so he put sort of pairs of scissors and all kinds of metal things on the strings of the piano.
All of that is piano, but sort of prepared piano, and that was how we got all the claw cua bam thing.
That’s all piano!

And then we took out the main band, so we just had the piano left and so it's another case of starting out with one thing and putting something on top of it and taking away the number you first thought of and then when that happens, when that happens you've got that,you think "y God that reminds me of such and such a thing" and then you start to sort of work around that.
That kind of area.

Fan. Oh it's sort of a built up kind of thing, when you have an idea and you tell everybody just to improvise?

D.B. Only that particular track.

There are other tracks which I will point out, that are done in a completely different system.

I think a lot of the stuff that we write, we've got maybe five or six different systens we use for writing material now and we find more systems every time we do an album which is very much it. I'm very much influenced by Brian on that particular aspect, which is the cybernetic use of music, which is the use of systems.
Put one system with another and see what happens so that applies still very much to what we're doing.

Next one or what?

Fan. You said in the last interview with Nicky,about perhaps doing reactionary types of song writing in which you sit down with an idea and do paragraph one, paragraph two.

Fan. Have you done that with this one?

D.B. That came out with this one yes, but actually that was used on,somebody mentioned Sweet Thing earlier, from Diamond Dogs, that was used on that as well it goes back that far.
Diamond Dogs was the first album that I really incorporated the William Burroughs cut up technique and I've sort of been moving in and out of that ever since, sometimes not so much, and sometimes quite a lot, but Diamond Dogs has an awful lot of cut ups on,but I felt terribly embarrassed by the process at the time because nobody else was doing it and I didn't want to say how I was writing things like that. I thought, people were going to think that I'm nuts, you know cutting up words and "Yeah I see, cut up a few words.Very good David," and I felt a bit reticent, but then it became terribly fashionable so I thought I'd tell everybody. (Laughs)

MOVE ON

D.B. Well that one of course is blantantly romantic. (laughs)

Interesting thing about that one is that the middle section da da dede dum, I was playing through some old tapes of mine on a sort of revox thing and one of them accidently I played backwards, and I thought “God that’s beautiful, I must do that!”, so without listening to what it was originally was we recorded that whole thing note for note as it was backwards,and I did all the vocal harmonies with Tony Visconti backwards.

You play it backwards, you'll find it's All The Young Dudes. (Laughs)

Extraordinary.

Fan. It sounds like you're enjoying yourself a whole lot more on this album?

D.B. New York is a very enjoyable city at the moment,very exciting and probably it's having it's sort of hey-day ot the moment as far as everything is concerned music, painters, whatever the whole arts thing in New York is extraordinary astonishing and it really is a sort of new thing happening there, much more than I found in London for instance where it's a bit patchy.

Fan. That song sounds to me like The 21st Century Cowboy?

D.B. Yes oh yes, it's all that dom diddle dom diddle dom.
Yes thats how it’s sort of recorded all this stuff.
Sort of Clint Eastwood in drag.

D.B.Yes it's sort of has those undertones. (laughs)
As I say a lot of it is frankly very light hearted and there's a sort of.

Fan. Is that an immediate reaction to Heroes?

D.B.Yes I think it probably is,all side effects.
Oh God I can't take anymore otherwise I'm going to press my head in.
Let’s take my hands away for a bit and try and relax the face muscles.
Yes it really is that sort of thing, I think it's.. I'm so pleased that the conclusion of these three albums is something that has been so ‘up’!

I was thinking “Oh God what have I done?" but you never know till you come out of the studio exactly what you've done”.

You know and I think, it would have been terribly depressing if the third one had even been further down there somewhere, at least this one has a sort of sign.
Yes you know..
Some kind of optimism.

YASSASSIN

D.B. That's Simon House, who of course was with Hawkwind and now with me at the moment, who excelled himself.
Simon is just a super player and only has to hear something once to understand the feel. He transcends the superficial quality of something.He really didn't have much knowledge of Turkish music but, he listened to just a little and he understood the notation and he was super.

Fan. Did you have any voice training for that one?

D.B. (Laughs)
Yes “the singing lessons paid off mother!”
I think Ian Dury said that? (laughs)
No I mean it was sort of you know a sort of a I guess a carricature of the kind of things that one hears in the coffee bars in the Turkish areas.
Another I suppose, an interesting thing about that is what we did, in fact was to put two ethnic sounds together.
We used the notation of the Turkish side of things but we put it against a Jamaican back beat ‘cause they're both sort of parallel in certain areas and I thought it might be an interesting way in working with them.

Fan. Is that the cultural concept you were talking about?


D.B. Yes,yes it does keep cropping up.
Talking about cross cultures the next one’s perfect. We took a Gernan new music feel and put it against the idea of a contemporary expatriate English mercenary/come swash buckling Errol Flynn and put him in the high seas of China somewhere, somewhere around there and we got all these lovely cross references and it produces this lovely pastiche and I really like this one, it's called Red Sails.

I don't know what it's about.

RED SAILS

Nicky. What do you think of that?
Now you've heard what four or five tracks off the album.
Has the feel so far suprised you ‘cause I know it really surprised me when I listened to it on cassette this morning.
It was not what I was expecting.
Was it what you were expecting?

Fan. Yeah.
Fan. Very up beat,
Fan. Because most Bowie albums I buy the first time I hear it...
(D.B. You cry? laughs)
Fan. I can't get into it at all.I really don't like it, then after about four or five listens to it....
D.B. Yes this one works in reverse, you'll love it for the first week, then you'll be putting it in the little box outside the newsagents.

Fan. You'll get plenty of singles out of it though.

Fan. Much more commercial .
Not so introverted.

D.B. It is actually far more introverted lyrically more than the others but it's presented in a sort of... more outward going way.

D.B. It is I think New York that did that?
When you're in New York you have to be sort of mentally boisterous you do.
I mean you can't sort of get into yourself in New York at all,there's something about it, the pressures are sort of, okay put it up front you know.
What’s the bottom line?
It's very sort of up and you can't escape that, it sort of takes you over.
With Berlin it's insidious and you feel sort of damp and crumbling all the time, rather like the buildings you know.
You get weary and it comes out weary.


Fan. Did you go to New York deliberately for that effect?

D.B. Yes I wanted,well not for the effect, I wanted to see what would happen to me in New York this time if I wrote in New York and that's what happened. Okay side two.
This one is sort of self evident and it's sort of a bit cynical I suppose,but it's my natural response to disco.

It's called ‘I am a D.J.’

D.J.

D.B. They,they are the ones that are having the ulcers now not the executives.
The DJ has the biggest ulcer of all.

Fan. Why is that?

D.B. Because if you do the unspoken,which is that you don't put a record on in time in a disco and there's 30 seconds of silence that's it! You know your whole career is over.
And you're walking a line to be a DJ now, you've got to be the ultimate in perfection.
Okay now let’s see what’s absurd about that?
The most absurd thing about that was I was with John Cale in New York one night and I tell you that I(to my mothers delight I'm sure if I told her) played John Cale's viola at Carnegie Hall three weeks ago.He phoned me up and said.. (this is leading up to something)he phoned me up and said there's a sort of a benefit for one of the radio stations in New York.It's one of the few stations that still plays interesting music because New York radio,forgot it, it's ghastly,awful, absolutely awful!
It's all disco,everything, and there's one station that isn't,it's a college run thing and it's going out of business so they wanted to do a sort of benefit thing,well of course Philip Glass and Steve R are on the bill so I couldn't refuse and I said what do you want me to do,so he said, well sort of jam with us,so I said “okay!”.
So I get to Carnegie Hall, get back stage and think”right where's the guitar, whatever, piano?”
"No I want you to play this boyo!"

But it's a viola,I've never touched one in my life.
So I played viola and we had a ball.It was great!
I learnt four notes and I'm thinking of taking it up and learning six or seven for the next album.
Anyway I played him the album and we got to this track and he said it sounds like the Allman Brothers,well I think that's the most absurd thing I've ever heard in my life.

Do you think it sounds like the Allman Brothers?

Fan. What was the inspiration behind it?

D.B. Intriguing. I think it was this particular character was a very depressed D J. The opening line is “I'm home,lost my job and I'm incurably ill, you think this is easy? Realism!” and he's terribly...his only satisfaction in life is that not that he's got a job as a DJ,it’s that his boss,his old boss,is the person that dances for him and so now that is his goal ,watching his boss,he just becomes a puppet in his hands.
It's sort of the idea behind it.

I mean all these DJs in New York.
New York is now one big disco now.
Okay next one is about...

I had this thought about angels and I thought we’ll go for angels and the angel of death is always the character that is most reverved and thought of him with this austere sense of unwell being and I thought, suppose we had a tatty angel of death,one a bit sort of grubby round the edges and so, this one is sort of an angel of death who spends his time in restaurants and cafes waiting for somebody to die, sort of.. “are you ready”,and nobody really listens, and he sort of get’s crumpled wings and he spends his time drinking coffee and looking through magazines until somebody's going to die,but nobody does.
That sort of was the idea.

That was the idea,it's called ‘Look Back in Anger’.

LOOK BACK IN ANGER

D.B. It was irresistible ‘cause once we'd done the (sings)”waiting so long “ dadada,
It had to have waiting so long I've been waiting so waiting long.

This one is called Repetition,and it's a sombre subject.

I'll just play it.

REPETITION

D.B. That,that again is something that you're faced with in the American newspapers all the time. I mean the whole thing about wife beating is just unbelieveable in The States it's become commonplace

Fan. What's that track called?

D.B, Repetition.

Fan. I like that one and the Turkish one very much.

D.B. Yes they're I suppose they're immediate?

Fan. I think the Turkish one's my Favourite.

D.B. If there are any straight forward social observations,then those two are probably ‘it’ on the album.
I didn't, I certainly didn't want it to end up with a sort of statement...

Fan.Your voice seems very similar to Gospel According To Tony Day.

D.B. Yes it does go back, I think that again is something that I found remarkable when I finished. How much I'd taken from all my previous albums on it.
Some of them, even, I mean Fantastic Voyage could have quite easily turned up on Hunky Dory! I mean there's lot of different areas of what I've done.
Okay,this is the last track off the album and it's the cheekiest yet,and I'll just explain.
Well firstly in some of the paintings I've done, red boxes keep appearing abstractly.

Fan. Which we never see.

D.B. Right!
The people hold red boxes and I often wondered what the red box was all about in the painting,but I sort of came to the conclusion that it was probably responsibility because the people who are carrying the red boxes always are like that, they've got it and they don't want it, you know sort of stuck with this red box, so I thought I put it into a song as well so the red box is back, and I think it's about responsibility, and it's called (laugh) Red Money.

RED MONEY

D.B Ladies and Gentlemen that's it, that's Lodger.

Fan. Why do you call it Lodger?

D.B. Oh it's just you know.. again in New York that's how I felt.
There's ... was a sort of definitely a thematic thing on the first side about travelling, and I didn't want to make too much of a thing about that and call it ‘Travel Along With Bowie ‘or something, so I thought Lodger, you know casually covered it all.

Fan. Was it originally called Look Back In Anger?

D.B. There was a point where it was going to be called that, it Was also going to be called Planned Accidents, and just before that it was going to be called Despite Straight Lines, which all went out the window.

Fan. I liked Planned Accidents.

D.B. Planned Accidents yeah, I think that's what we'll probably use as an instrumental album.
I think Brian and I might get together on something just called Planned Accidents.

Maybe just the two of us,with maybe, I don't know.

Fan. When you were talking about New York you were talking about pretty chicks and disco and all that, and lots of fame all have to end you said.
I don't think it has.

D.B. Is that what I said?

Fan. Yes.

D.B. Why don't I keep my mouth shut?
(Laughs)

CAPITAL RADIO MAY 14th 1978.