David Bowie ... The Next Day

[ami]

thanks for the update!

[Halloweenjack84]

Scanner decided to take a holiday so a cut and paste job...

An interesting little Tony Visconti interview from yesterdays The Times.


Jack




.......................................THE TIMES......Tim Teeman....................................



After a silent decade David Bowie is back.
Tim Teeman talks to the singer’s producer, friend and representative on Earth.

Scroll to the bottom for a track-by-track guide to Bowie’s new album!


Tony Visconti has known David Bowie since 1967 and produced 12 of his most memorable albums, beginning with The Man Who Sold the World (1970). He has done “mountains of cocaine” with his longtime friend, “though alcohol was far worse”. Both are now sober veterans of Alcoholics Anonymous, living in New York with a shared passion for Japanese food — Bowie is “very much a sushi guy”.
But when Bowie called Visconti two years ago to “work on some demos”, the 68-year-old producer admits that he was shocked.

“I had no idea he was writing again. We had spoken in 2009 and he had made it clear he wasn’t writing. And now this week, the single came out and it shocked the world,” he says.

The song, Where Are We Now?, a melancholic lament for Berlin where Bowie and Visconti lived in the 1970s, caused a global Bowie-gasm on Tuesday, Bowie’s 66th birthday, released with no advance hype at 5am GMT. It received its premiere on Radio 4’s Today programme. An album, Bowie’s first for ten years, The Next Day, will be released on March 11.

On the eve of the single’s release, “I couldn’t sleep,” Visconti reveals, drinking water in a smart New York private members’ club. He is dressed all in black, slim — he traded in drugs and booze for t’ai chi — with cropped white hair. “I’d kept a secret for two years, I knew the release date for two months, it was a countdown, 47 days to go . . . the final day we were e-mailing each other. I’d say, ‘I’m biting all my nails down, it’s 2 hours and 35 minutes,’ and he [Bowie] would write back, ‘2 hours and 26 minutes.’ Then I saw some posts on Bowie Worldwide just after midnight: ‘Holy shit’, ‘Oh my God . . .’ Everyone had written him off. The next day he was very happy about how well it had been received.
‘Well, what did you expect?’ I said.”

Bowie, he says, told him he would “never do another interview again” making Visconti, I say, his voice on Earth. “Tell me about it,” he says, wryly. The singer had a heart attack in 2004 and there have been rumours that he was suffering from cancer. “They’re categorically not true,” Visconti says. “He does not have cancer. If there’s one thing I would like to dispel it’s the rumours about his ill-health. He’s incredibly fit and takes care of himself. Obviously after the heart attack he wasn’t too thrilled but he has an amazing family and friends. Visconti calls family “the F-word” with good reason. He became estranged from Bowie in 1988 having talked about Bowie’s close relatives to the press in a way the singer felt was “too intrusive”. They reconciled “because we’re friends”.

Since his heart attack, Bowie has been painting — an exhibition of new work is possible, Visconti says — “and doing a phenomenal amount of reading: old English history, Russian history, the monarchs of Great Britain — what made them bad and good. Everything he reads makes it into the lyrics of his songs”, which is evident in our exclusive breakdown of the rest of the songs on the album about tyrants, spies and soldiers.

“I’ve worked with other rock stars who want to talk about their yachts and horses. Not David,” says the producer, fondly. Love in the internet age, glam rock and the workings of fame form more personal thematic ballast.

Certain to create the most headlines is Valentine’s Day, Bowie’s response to the epidemic of gun violence in American schools. It was written a year before the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in December. “It’s about mental health rather than gun control. It’s all young people doing these shootings. It goes inside the head of the shooter. David gives him the name Johnny, which I think is the name he’s given to about 12 people in his songs over the past 40 years.”

Why Johnny?
“I don’t know. Maybe it rhymes well: a generic name which helps describe the common man. The issue for him isn’t so much guns but the mental health of the shooter. In the past two years there have been so many shootings and the next day we’d come into the studio and say ‘What the f*ck? Why is this happening?’ We were shocked like everyone else and don’t think it’s going to end anytime soon. We have kids and we can’t imagine the horror . . . the worst thing to happen to our kids would be them being shot in public.”

The Berlin period featured in the new single, when Bowie lived with Iggy Pop, wasn’t as depraved as people think. “We got drunk a lot. But he lived a very spartan life. Iggy had his bedroom, David had his.”

Did their relationship go beyond friendship?
“No, absolutely not and at that time he had serious financial problems. He was breaking up with [first wife] Angie and he was reconstructing his life. Certainly there were periods when he reached the depths.

“During the making of Young Americans [1975] he was taking so much cocaine it would have killed a horse. Cocaine certainly almost killed me. During the making of that album I nearly died. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I worked day and night. He’d come in to the studio at 11pm and work till 11am. One day I said, ‘I have to pack it in, the cocaine isn’t propping me up any more. I cannot stay awake. On the way home my heart felt like it was going to explode. I didn’t want to cause a scandal for him and me by going to hospital, so I took 12 sleeping pills — no suicidal intent, just to slow my heart and it did and I survived. We’d have both been dead if we’d carried on. There was a myth it wasn’t habit-forming back then. Foolishly we believed that. It was a social drug and socially acceptable. You went to any cocktail party and somebody put a line or spoon under your nose and you said ‘Oh, thank you.’ I know people who sold their homes to feed their habit. For us there was no limit.”

Visconti stopped taking cocaine in 1984. “I woke up one day imagining there were phantoms in the room. I just went cold turkey.” He stopped drinking in 2000 and Bowie and he both went to AA. “David found it very useful. We talk about being each other’s support system. If two people from the programme sit together that’s technically an AA meeting. Every two or three days we talk about it, although we don’t start and end with a prayer. I’ll say, ‘I’m coming to my 12th birthday’ and he says, ‘Well it’s been my 23rd.’ I ask, ‘Do you miss it?’ and he says, ‘I don’t miss it at all,’ and I say, ‘Me neither.’”

Sometimes the men recollect how drunk they were at a party, the limo that would wait for them outside after-hours clubs in New York. Their most outrageous night? “We stayed up with John Lennon until 10.30am. We did a mountain of cocaine, it looked like the Matterhorn, obscenely big, and four open bottles of cognac.” Visconti pauses. “He doesn’t do anything now. He’s Mr Clean. He looks great, rosy-cheeked. If you’re doing drugs and drinking at 66 you look like shit.”

Bowie’s poison now?
A strong macchiato. Otherwise he drinks water in the studio, and eats roast beef sandwiches and salads.

The two have created 29 songs together of late, making a second album almost inevitable. “We’re not going to give up on the songs that haven’t made this one,” Visconti says.

“We’re going to go back and look at them because they’re spectacular musical pieces, they just haven’t been finished lyrically. I think he’s on a roll, and will possibly return to the studio later this year. If people don’t like this album then maybe he won’t, but it doesn’t matter to him. He told me what he wants to do is make records. He does not want to tour. He’s been doing it for more than 30 years and he’s tired of it. I’ve been with him on tour and, no matter how cosseted they are, they lose sleep, they get miserable and lonely. After being on stage they just want to get into the limo and crash. It’s gruelling and the star of the show has to deliver most on stage.”

Visconti recalls seeing him after a concert at Jones Beach outside New York in 2003. “He just sat there and said, ‘I’m knackered.’ He wasn’t enjoying it.”

It has been rumoured this week that Bowie might appear at the Glastonbury and SXSW festivals. “There is no possibility whatsoever,” Visconti says. “I don’t want to give people any hope. He’s pretty adamant that he’s found his muse. ‘I just want to make records,’ he told me.”

After the heart attack, Bowie resumed contact by sending Visconti “jokes and YouTube videos of people doing stupid things. I don’t think artists ever retire, why would he retire? Some artists have long periods of not creating: they need to accumulate experiences and have something to write about. I’ve read Christopher Hitchens’s book Mortality and I’m sure David has too.”

Bowie walks among New Yorkers well disguised: “He doesn’t stand on street corners for any length of time.” He was papped outside the recording studio in SoHo, New York, in October, but it was a rare sighting. He travels all over the world, “but you wouldn’t know it because he doesn’t want you to. He values his privacy because he hasn’t had a private life.”

The album was made over an 18-month period, then in the studio intensively for three months, two weeks at a time. Bowie makes his own demos at home on a computer.

“He knows how to make a drum loop and record chords and do a backing vocal over them,” his friend says. Sometimes tracks are just music or “la-la-las”. “He gets us to feel a song might be about an assassination, so everyone gets in that mood. None of the songs are pre-written, he jots down notes and I keep the microphone settings the same for each song so we can return to it.” The new single has very sparse lyrics, he explains, but every line evokes a feeling and reminded him of how much Berlin felt like a film noir, “a Third Man city. There is such drama there: the killing, Hitler . . .”

Visconti met Bowie and the singer Marc Bolan at the same time. “I knew they’d both be big,” he says. It was Bolan who was the more rivalrous, and Bowie, who discovered glam rock — in Visconti’s estimation — “about an hour before Bolan. They’re like my sons, I can’t say who I love more, but Bolan saw everyone as a threat. A friend showed me a picture of him, disguised, watching David and I on stage supporting Hawkwind, the hairiest band ever. He’s wearing a cloth cap so we wouldn’t recognise him.”

As for Bowie’s sexuality (in the Seventies he said he was gay, then bi), “I never witnessed him with a boyfriend. I certainly think he wanted people to think that but his main squeezes were always women. There was such homophobia back then. He said the best tactic was to go the other way and shock people. He said Ziggy Stardust was a persona but it confused people. I hear people even now saying, ‘You work with that queer.’ It’s never been dropped completely.”

Bowie “doesn’t care” about criticism, Visconti says. “He’s a very smart guy. Part of his thinking releasing the single may have been, ‘Let people think what they want, I’m going to shock them with this.’ If so, it came off flawlessly.”

Like many music journalists, Bowie and Visconti joke about good songs Bowie has made since the widely hailed album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) as “the best since since Scary Monsters”.
They also have another joke.
“Every time we go into the studio, we say, ‘This one’s going to be our Sgt Pepper.’”

He reveals that Bowie loves British comedy,particularly Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (he makes Visconti play Cook in sketch re-creations). DVDs of The Office played through the 2003 recording of the album Reality. Bowie is also addicted to the ITV drama Foyle’s War, the American police series The Shield and the French drama Spiral.

Visconti’s least favourite Bowie songs are from the Never Let Me Down period (“He lost his way”) but he likes Let’s Dance, even if he didn’t produce it. He says he likes to “mix things up” and has worked with Elaine Paige as well as Thin Lizzy. He produces younger bands today (including Razorlight and the Dandy Warhols) but is shocked by “how little musicianship they have compared to the 1970s, and I’m not being an old man — I was shocked by how little musicianship we had compared to Charlie Parker. Today they put 10,000 hours in on the computer, rather than shredding a guitar.”

Arctic Monkeys and Arcade Fire are honourable exceptions but he hates bands “channelling” the 1970s and 1980s. “It’s bollocks. Listen to the ballad we just released: it’s just a man singing from the heart with no trickery.”

Another single may precede the album’s release in March. Until then Visconti, three times married (once to the Welsh folk singer Mary Hopkin), with four children, and in a relationship for 12 years (“I’m more faithful as a single man, you have to work harder to keep up the romance”), will practise t’ai chi on his Manhattan roof and await more tantalising calls from the still-Thin White Duke. So, there’s more Bowie music to come and more surprises? “Oh yes,” Visconti says, grinning to the max.

David Bowie’s album The Next Day will be released on March 11 on RCA. The single Where Are We Now? is available on iTunes



Visconti’s guide to Bowie’s new album

01. The Next Day
An historical song and horrendously gruesome, I think it’s about a Catholic cardinal or tyrant. It’s very violent: the main character is hung, drawn and quartered, burnt and then torn apart by people.

02. Dirty Boys
A euphemism, and song, for all the glam rock stars that have ever been.

03. The Stars (Are Out Tonight)
It’s about all kinds of stars. You can say I’m being secretive.

04. Love is Lost
That’s not about a love affair but how everyone has cut down their feelings in the internet age.

05. Where Are We Now?
A very personal song — it’s about the Berlin we had been in in the 1970s. It is not as autobiographical as people are suggesting. He is a storyteller. This could be about him, or Berlin at a certain time.

06. Valentine’s Day
Inside the mind of a high school mass murderer named Johnny, inspired by the spate of shootings in US schools.

07. If You Can See Me
A challenging jazz-funk-rock composition, extremely fast with accompanying vocals by longtime Bowie singer Gail Ann Dorsey. Identities switch between someone who may be Bowie and a politician.

08. I’d Rather Be High
The lament of a demobbed Second World War soldier who would rather succumb to base emotions than be a human being. Bowie does not want to be high. He is clean and has been an AA member for years.

09. Boss of Me
Someone feels oppressed or abused, speaking in the third person.

10. Dancing Out in Space
A song about another music artist, possibly a conglomeration of artists.

11. How Does the Grass Grow?
It’s a companion song to I’d Rather Be High and is about the First World War: how British soldiers were trained as a metaphor for a lot of things. Sheer poetry.

12. (You Will) Set the World on Fire
About a young female singer who gets discovered in a nightclub in the 1960s. Does she set the world on fire? It’s not about anybody specific, but a couple of people who sang alongside Dylan.

13. You Feel So Lonely You Could Die
It’s about Russian history, from the time of the Cold War and espionage and about an ugly demise. It sounds like an R&B song.

14. Heat
It could be about prison, loneliness and sociopathic detachment. The lyrics are so bleak I asked him what he was talking about.
“Oh, it’s not about me,” he said.
None of these songs are.
He’s an observer.

[Halloweenjack84]

....t.h.e…n.e.x.t….d.a.y……

After all these years it’s fantastic to finally get to the next day where we can read posts/interviews & announcements about David Bowie and his music rather than “glorified ads” for second & third party books/exhibitions and rehashed rereleases....

Jack

[Halloweenjack84]

The Observer

[Halloweenjack84]

The Sunday Express

[Halloweenjack84]

The Sunday Telegraph






Too much hassle to scan so cut and pasted...





...............................The Sunday Telegraph ...............Cole Moreton .....................


David Bowie is not sick, says his close friend Tony Visconti. “People thought he was dying.
He’s not dying any time soon, let me tell you,” says Bowie’s long-time collaborator, who produced the comeback single that shocked the world on Tuesday.

Where Are We Now? was released online without warning in the early hours of Tuesday morning, taking Bowie’s fans by complete surprise.It came with the promise of a new album, his first in a decade – which was news even to people at his record company, Columbia.
Tuesday was Bowie’s birthday.
As he turned 66, the singer had been written off by the media as a recluse, a rock ’n’ roll Howard Hughes living secretively in Manhattan with his wife Iman and his 12-year-old daughter Alexandria, allegedly shunning the limelight because of ill health.
Visconti insists those rumours are not true.
“He couldn’t have done two years of work if he was a sick man. He’s very healthy, he’s very fit. He had the heart operation and that’s it. He’s long since recovered from that.”
Bowie was a heavy smoker and serious cocaine user who put his body under strain over many years, performing tirelessly in pursuit of album sales that now amount to 130 million.

Then he collapsed after coming off stage in Germany in 2004 and was flown by helicopter to hospital, where he had emergency heart surgery.After that, the singer appeared to retire. Fans who could not bear the thought of the great innovator living quietly preferred to believe that he had withdrawn from the world.

Lately, there have been rumours that he is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
Visconti, the Brooklyn-born Italian American who has been one of his closest allies since the Sixties,refutes this, too.
“He is as sharp as a tack. He is sharper than ever. This boy has not lost a single brain cell.”

This can’t be tested because Bowie is refusing to give interviews, leaving the talking to Visconti.If what he says is true, the melancholy new track might even be seen to be playing with the rumours.
“Where are we now?” sings Bowie in a cracked voice in the chorus,after verses that take the listener on a walk through Berlin.

The city is where he produced three of his greatest albums in the late Seventies: Low, Heroes and Lodger.
In the video, grainy black-and-white images give a sense of nostalgia as he sings about ageing and feeling lost.
Bowie’s face is projected eerily on to the head of a rag doll, one of conjoined twins.The face on the other head was a mystery at first, but turns out to be Jacqueline Humphries, wife of the multi-media artist who made the video,Tony Oursler.
The set was assumed to be in Berlin, but is actually Oursler’s studio in Manhattan, scattered with strange objects, including a diamond and a giant model of an ear.Bowie’s doll head looks sad, even tearful, and at one point he puffs his cheeks, apparently at the effort of getting the words out.When the singer does eventually appear in person,he is leaning against a wall with a notebook in his hand, gazing silently into the middle distance.
His T-shirt bears the name of the Song of Norway, a ship which is listed online as having “retired from international cruises”. Much like Bowie himself.

These new sights and sounds have had a powerful effect on fans who grew up with Bowie.They are as drawn to him as the previous generation was to Elvis,but this icon is growing old as they do.
Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet, for example, said he wept when he heard the record.
So did Herbie Flowers, the bass player on many of Bowie’s early hits.
“It did make me cry,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.
“It’s what the song is about.I totally identify with what he has done.I know exactly how he feels. It’s like a lament.”

Flowers, 74, is still playing and had just come home to Sussex from a long tour when he heard the single. “I think it’s wonderful. I’m glad he’s well.His voice goes right to me, as it does to millions of people.I love him, and I love the effect he has had on the planet.”

Tony Visconti is adamant, though, that the song should not be seen as evidence of Bowie’s frailty.
“That’s a vulnerable voice he has used time and time again. Fantastic Voyage(on Lodger), for example.
It’s part of his technique, to sing that way.
He put that voice on like he’s vulnerable, but he’s not frail.”

Bowie’s last live performance was actually a brief moment on stage at the Madison Square Garden in May 2007, when he introduced the comedian Ricky Gervais by singing Little Fat Man, the song they had written together for Extras.
The absurdity of ending his live career like that might actually appeal to Bowie,who was born in Brixton in 1947 and has a sharp, south London sense of humour. But it is silly to suggest, as many have, that he went into hiding completely after giving up the stage.

Bowie lives in a $4 million apartment in a former warehouse building in the Soho district of New York, and has often been seen in bookshops and art galleries in the area, on his own or with Iman. The former supermodel runs a multi-million dollar cosmetics business of her own.

Their daughter, known as Lexi, was yet to start school when Bowie became ill. As he recovered, they spent a lot more time together. Bowie is close to Duncan Jones, the son of his first wife Angie,who is a successful film maker, but he was away for much of the boy’s childhood and did not want to make that mistake again.

For all the talk of being a recluse,Bowie never actually stopped making public appearances.He was at the premiere of Duncan’s film Moon in Utah in 2009, for example, and with Iman when she received a fashion award in 2010.

Still, Tony Visconti thought his friend had given up writing songs, so was “totally surprised” to receive an email from Bowie in November 2010, while he was producing the Kaiser Chiefs’ album in London.
“He said, ‘When you get back, do you fancy doing some demos with me?’ This was the first time since Reality (in 2003) that it was even suggested that we do anything in any studio, so I was quite taken aback. There was no preamble, no warning.
It was really weird.”

A few days later, Visconti found himself in “a small, grimy room” at 6/8 Studios in Manhattan,close to Bowie’s home.
“Sterling Campbell was on drums, I was on bass, David was on keyboards, Gerry Leonard was on guitar. By the end of five days we had demoed up a dozen songs. Just structures. No lyrics, no melodies and all working titles. This is how everything begins with him. Then he took them home and we didn’t hear another thing from him for four months.”

Why was that?
“He wanted to listen and be certain he was on the right track.” They returned at last to a more upmarket studio called the Magic Shop, also within walking distance of the Bowie home. Now the drummer Zachary Alford and bassist Gail Ann Dorsey were involved. The guitarist Earl Slick joined in later.

“We only recorded for two-week periods and then we would take months off again while David analysed it all,” says Visconti. “I was walking around New York with my headphones on, looking at all the people with Bowie T-shirts on – they are ubiquitous here – thinking, ‘Boy, if you only knew what I’m listening to at the moment.’ ”

Everyone involved in the project had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. “For the older members of his tribe, we didn’t really need to do that.”
It suited them very well that nobody was expecting anything. “Bowie was photographed many times, very close to the studio, carrying lyrics,” says Visconti, laughing, “but people preferred to believe that he had retired, after the speculation of the last few years.”

How did Bowie feel about that?
“He never felt he had to defend himself. He was bemused by it.”
They were in the studio for a total of three-and-a-half months spread over an 18-month period. Surprisingly, they worked office hours, 10am to 6pm. “The last time we did all-nighters was Young Americans,” says Visconti. “We work intensely for those hours. We don’t take a break, except to eat some lunch and watch a little bit of Harry & Paul.” Yes, he really does mean the BBC sketch show by Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse. “We love them.
But then we get on with it.”

So what does it sound like, this album which is due out in March and called The Next Day?
“This is a serious record. Half of it you will need to listen to a couple of times. There are some very strange songs, a new direction. He’s tapping into his jazz roots. The song called If You Can See Me has very wide, beautiful, crunchy jazz chords, with time signatures that Dave Brubeck would be proud of.”
Half the record has a classic sound, though. “There are four or five songs that would get an audience up on its feet, clapping. It’s arena Bowie.”

Despite all reports to the contrary, Visconti reveals that Bowie may actually perform these songs live.
“He doesn’t want to tour any more. He’s had enough of it. But he hasn’t ruled out that he might do a show. It was a relief to me to hear that he was open to that.”
Will there be another record? “We recorded 29 titles. We have at least four finished songs that could start the next album,” says Tony Visconti happily.
“If all goes well, we will be back in the studio by the end of the year.
He’s back.
Bowie has found out what he wants to do: he wants to make records.

Nothing else."

[Halloweenjack84]

[LoveOnYaFromAmsterdam]

All wonderful stuff, I'll keep coming back for the next few weeks for more of such gems. Thanks!

[Halloweenjack84]

And the same excellent 'Bowie Birthday News' as reported from the shores of Australia as only the excellent Aussie's can do.

I'm off for an 'amber nectar' but feel free to think the male presenter a diddy in my absence?


Jack

[Halloweenjack84]

From today's online Rolling Stone.

www.rollingstone.com/music/news/david-bowies-the-next-day-album-a-track-by-track-preview-20130115




Tony Visconti,Bowie & Brian Thorn


............Rolling Stone ...........Andy Greene..........Jan 15th 2013................

Tony Visconti has been producing David Bowie's albums since Space Oddity in 1969. They've worked together on many of Bowie's greatest triumphs, including Heroes, Young Americans and Scary Monsters. After a long break, they joined forces again in the early 2000s for Heathen and Reality.

Two years ago, he started working with Bowie on his long-awaited new album, The Next Day.

Rolling Stone spoke to Visconti about the pair's secret sessions, how medieval English history inspired some of the songs and why it's unlikely that Bowie will tour – though a single show remains possible. As the producer noted, his other longtime collaborator, Morrissey, has the opposite plan. . . but he'll get to that.

Was there ever a point over the past few years where you thought that Bowie would never record again?

I was a little scared after he had his heart condition. He had a little scare himself. I didn't speak to him for a year after that. He was just recovering and just not talking to anybody. But I was one of the first people he emailed afterwards and we were steadily in contact since then. But he never really brought up music until two years ago. So he never said to me he retired, and every time I saw him in person, he looked in really good health.


All these rumors started going around about his health. Every time I had lunch with him, or coffee with him, I'm looking at him and my dear old friend was looking really good. But music didn't interest him until two years ago; that's when he made the call. He said, "How would you like to make some demos?" And I was a little shocked, quite honestly; it was just so casual. It was just the next topic in the discussion.

How did the process begin?

I was working on another project in London, and he didn't know that. He said, "Well, when are you going to get back?" I said, "In a few days." The next morning after I returned, I was in the studio with him playing bass. We had Sterling Campbell on drums, Gerry Leonard on guitar and David on keyboards. We were in this little studio down in the East Village doing demos for a week. I was pinching myself. I couldn't believe it was really happening. From nothing, right into this demo situation.

Did he have fleshed-out songs at this point?

Yes, he wrote them at home. He had an eight- or 16-track digital recorder. They were quite fleshed out. He had nice bass line ideas and drum patterns. We quickly took down the names of the chords and we scribbled it out on paper. Gerry Leonard and I read from the chord sheet. The room was about eight-by-eight, which included a drum kit. We were on top of each other, gasping for air after an hour or two.
What sparked all this? He had been gone for so many years at this point
He just said, "I feel like writing again." I don't know long prior to that he began writing. He just came up with about eight songs.

How many days did you spend demoing in that East Village studio?

We spent five days, and we didn't record anything until the last day. We just kept writing down notes. On the fifth day, it was hard to try to remember what we did on the first day. But we got them down and this guy at the studio had a basic Pro Tools rig, and we got them down. This is November 2010. Then he disappeared for four months and said, "I'm gonna start writing now." So he wrote more songs and then he fleshed those out even more. He came up with lyrics and melodies, which he didn't have at first. But that's typical of every record I started to work with him. Scary Monsters, every album started out with maybe one finished song and 10 ideas, so this is typical.

What happened next?

In April of 2011 we went into a downtown New York studio. We only worked for two-week periods. We would take as long as two months off after each period, and he would go and write some more stuff. I would listen to it and get some ideas, sketch out some overdub things, and we'd be in constant communication during those periods. So this is about 18 months ago. If you added up all the weeks in the studio, we probably actually spent three-and-a-half months.

You've said that the first single, "Where Are We Now," isn't like any other song on the album. Do the other songs look back on his life like that one?

Not really; that's the only one. It's really the only one of its kind. Everything else on the album is kind of observations. He's writing in the third person. Some of them belong to his life, but some of them are things like social commentary. He was reading a lot of medieval English history books, and he came up with one medieval English history song. That's the title track, "The Next Day." It's about somebody who was a tyrant, very insignificant; I didn't even know who he was talking about. But if you read the lyrics, it's quite a horrific story.

You've said there are five rockers on the album.

Yeah. "The Next Day" rocks out. Same with "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)" – that rocks out, too.

Are the non-rockers more mellow? What's their vibe?

They're more funky, mid-tempo songs. Very evocative. "Dirty Boys," the second song on the album, is very sleazy.

Sleazy in what sense?


It's dark and it's sexy. There's a fantastic sax solo. You know, David plays baritone sax, but he invited his friend Steve Elson to do the baritone on this album. I think Steve was in the Saturday Night Live band. He's a little guy, and he's got a huge baritone sax, and he plays this dirty solo in it that sounds like stripper music from the 1950s. Old bump-and-grind stripper music . . . It wouldn't be out of place on Young Americans.

Tell me about "Dancing Out in Space."

That's a very uptempo one. It's got a Motown beat to it, but the rest of it is completely psychedelic. It's got very floaty vibe. There's a guy called David Torn who plays guitar, who we use; he comes with huge amounts of equipment that he creates these aural landscapes. He uses them in a rock context with all that ambient sound, and he's bending his tremolo arm and all that. It's just crazy, completely crazy sound on that track.

How about "Boss of Me?"

That is one of the slower, funky ones. It's really solid. There's a little Young Americans in there. But that's really not proper . . . It's a new kind of direction for him, melodically. Doesn't sound like typical Bowie, that track. But it's a very good track.

OK. Tell me about "Heat."

Well that's the closer of the album and it's very dramatic. And I'm not quite sure what he's singing about on it, but it's a classic Bowie ballad. He's singing in his handsomest voice, a very deep, very sonorous voice. And I can't give too much away about it because honestly, I don't know exactly what it's about, if it's about being in a real prison or being imprisoned in your mind. Again, it's certainly not about him; he's singing as the voice of somebody.

Tell me about "I'd Rather Be High."

There's a few songs about world wars, about soldiers. One is "How Does the Grass Grow" and it's about the way that soldiers are trained to kill other soldiers, how they have to do it so heartlessly. "How Does the Grass Grow" is part of a chant that they're taught as they plunge their bayonets into a dummy. "I'd Rather Be High" is about a soldier who's come out of the war and he's just burnt out, and rather than becoming a human being again, I think he laments, "I'd rather be high/I don't want to know/I'm trying to erase these thoughts from my mind."


Who exactly is the band on the album?

We had two drummers. The main drummer was Zachary Alford, and Sterling Campbell played on several tracks, too. It's unfortunate. Sterling was at the demo sessions in the beginning but then he didn't know when the album was gonna start, and he already committed to a tour with the B-52s. We called Zach in to substitute for him, and Zack played amazing drums on the album. But Sterling is in there as well on songs like "Valentine's Day" and "(You Will) Set the World on Fire," which is another steamer, another big rock song on the album.

Bass was predominantly Gail Ann Dorsey, and she played phenomenally well on the album, and she also did some backup vocals with David. The other bass player who played on about four or five tracks was Tony Levin. The guitars are Gerry Leonard who played on Heathen and Reality, and he's David's music director. David Torn on the other ambient guitar. And then we got Earl Slick to play some fantastic guitar solos and heavy guitar on some tracks. I played bass on the album for two songs, and that's about it. David played his own keyboards; he played also some acoustic guitar, some electric guitar as well.

How hard was it to keep this a secret?

It was very easy to keep it a secret because we're very loyal to him. I've known him 45 years, and everybody knew him for more than 10 years in the band. We just love the guy. He said, "Keep it a secret, and don't tell anybody. Not even your best friend." I said, "Can I tell my girlfriend?" He says, "Yes, you can tell your girlfriend, but she can't tell anybody." So everybody had to explain why they were leaving for work in the morning, you know where they were going and who they were recording with.

The real trick was just not telling even your best friend. Bowie fans are just unpredictable – if they hear news like this, the cover would have been blown years ago. Now one person did leak it, but nobody believed him . . .

Who?

Robert Fripp! He was asked to play on it, he didn't want to do it and then he wrote on his blog that he was asked. And nobody kinda believed him. It was a little flurry for a few days, but everyone said, "How could that be true? We haven't heard it from anyone else?"

The big question: Do you think Bowie will tour?

He says that he will only play if he feels like it, but no tour. Like, if wanted to do the odd show in New York or, I don't know, London, he would if he felt like it. And he made that very clear to the label that he wasn't going to tour or do any kind of ridiculously long album promotion. It was his idea to just drop it at midnight on his birthday and just let things avalanche.

Do you really think it's possible he'd do just one show?

It's possible, if he feels like it. I don't know. I spoke to him two days ago and he said, "I'm really adamant I'm not gonna do a tour." And he said, "If I might, I might do one show." But who knows when.

The album cover is sort of intriguing . . .

I only just got that. I wasn't sure that was the cover.

It's real.

I thought some fan made a joke cover.

I though that too, but it's real.
[Laughs]

Thoughts on that?

I think it's great! It gives him a nice space to sign his autograph in the middle of it.

Do you think that you and Morrissey will ever work together again?

Hopefully we will. I'm going to see him Friday night in Brooklyn. We email a lot. We talk a lot. He's very reluctant to have a deal with anybody. 'Cause nowadays, the problem is, when a label signs you – right now, he has no label – so if I sign a new label deal, he has to sign a 360 deal. They want a piece of everything. If you write a book, if you write a song, if you're in a movie, they want part of your fee for all these things. So that's the deal that the big labels are offering now and that's because sales are so low and they have to make up their money some way. He's totally against that. He's old-school. I actually I don't blame him.

He could pull a Radiohead and post it online for a fee.

I know. He's also old school about paying for it himself. Traditionally, the label's gotta pay for him. I understand that, and there's an old saying in show business that you never invest your own money in a show. It kinda follows onto recording to some extent, but that attitude has changed.

He could also sign to an indie label that wouldn't make him sign a 360. . . But beyond that, he has enough fans that he'd make a killing charging $10 for an album online?

Yeah, he'll make his money back, yeah. He's playing his new songs onstage, they're being recorded on cell phones every night of the week and they're wonderful songs.

[ami]

thanks for posting these, Jack.Always interestingto read other peoples views, though the Aussie one is annoying!

[Halloweenjack84]

[Halloweenjack84]

I guess everyone has pre ordered their copies of The Next Day and got their little Where Are We Now? downloads but being old school, guess I'll just wait until the day of release and go downtown to a record store and buy the Deluxe edition Cd and the vinyl double album, as it'll probably be the last time one will be able to do this (in this age of iTunes/Amazon.com et all who don't pay their proper tax and f*ck up our country and high streets!)as it'll probably be a more nostalgic way of buying hopefully what will be a classic Bowie album for the last time the way that one has always bought Bowie albums as a Bowie fan?

Jack

P.S. "Where Are We Now?"
(And do we really want to be here?)


P.P.S. " I don't normally listen to much Pop Music!" Lol!

[nightporter]

Jan 19, 2013 17:56:17 GMT Halloweenjack84 said:

P.S. "Where Are We Now?"
(And do we really want to be here?)


P.P.S. " I don't normally listen to much Pop Music!" Lol!

well said jack these are sad times we live in.

[Halloweenjack84]

Not really much to do with the release of 'Where Are We Now?' and the imminent release of 'The Next Day' but still coverage riding on the back of all the publicity.

In today's Sun so make of it what you will....

Jack