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Tilda Swinton to play Bowie in biopic.
It worked for Cate Blanchett.
Video
FEATHERS (featuring DAVID BOWIE) - Ching-A-Ling (1968)
Happy 63rd Birthday, David Bowie. Let’s trip down memory lane.
In that meandering, five-year build-up to Bowie’s first bona fide hit single, ”Space Oddity,” there were a lot of false starts, including a half-dozen bands and a change of surname, but the weirdest stop on the merry-go-round may have been his multi-media gambit, Feathers.
First thing you’ll notice upon viewing this clip is Bowie’s subservience to a pair of lead singers, Hermione Farthingale and John Hutchinson. The song was written by Bowie, yet he’s uncharacteristically low-profile here. Why? And who are these people?
By early 1968, the 21-year-old Bowie had a flop debut album and a series of failed singles under his belt. Bowie and then-manager Ken Pitt’s latest ploy to crash the pop charts involved writing and performing in the style of au courant ”top ten rubbish” (Bowie’s descriptor). Of course, Bowie’s hardly ever been at his best when writing for an audience, such are his anti-populist tendencies, and so these songs (“Let Me Sleep Beside You,” “Karma Man” and “In The Heat Of The Morning”) failed to ride the post-Summer Of Love quasi-psychedelic zeitgeist, or whatever the hell he was aiming for, meaning all he got for his pains was getting dropped by his record label.
Shellshocked from his latest failures, Bowie licked wounds through 1968, issuing no new product but keeping busy with the troupe he developed with lover Farthingale and friend Hutchinson. Feathers curated several “arts lab” get-togethers in London that year, while Bowie continued his mime studies under Lindsay Kemp and worked with Ken Pitt on a film idea. The latter project actually begat the video you’re watching now: despite his charge’s complete lack of success, Pitt was able to pony up enough cash to film nine clips set to Bowie songs, in yet another attempt to sell the artiste to the public. Some of the songs dated back to Bowie’s 1967 album (David Bowie, which is being reissued later this month); the remainder were new creations, including a catchy new tune ostensibly about an astronaut getting lost in space: “Space Oddity.”
In other words, if you throw enough shit against the wall, something’s eventually gonna stick.
Now, about this song (“Ching-A-Ling”) and its performers: Bowie and Hermione were lovers, and judging from some of his comments after the fact, this girl was The One That Got Away. “Letter To Hermione” and “An Occasional Dream,” from his next album, were teary stabs at reconciling loss. Hutchinson faded from the picture in 1970, but was back by 1973 as an adjunct member of The Spiders From Mars, playing 12-string acoustic on the final Ziggy Stardust tour. That’s “Hutch” kicking off “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide” right after Bowie’s infamous, shock ”retirement” speech. Lastly, listen to Bowie’s vocal line during the “Ching-A-Ling” chorus: this song wasn’t released in the day, so Bowie evidently felt it was jake to recycle his harmony part for an interlude in “Saviour Machine,” a hard-rocking track from his 1971 album, The Man Who Sold The World.
The nine videos shot for this project gathered dust for 15 years (tsk tsk) before Pitt was finally able to recoup losses, when he released them to the home video market as Love You Till Tuesday in 1984. It’s required viewing for any Dave fan, and helpfully, a bunch of clips are available on YouTube.
I’ll start you off with a link to the original “Space Oddity.” It’s a gas.
Video
DAVID BOWIE - Can’t Help Thinking About Me (1999)
“It does contain two of the worst lines I’ve ever written.”
Oooh, watch David Bowie do exactly what we wish all musical legends would do: delve deep into the murky past and play something you never expected to hear.
1999’s Hours… heralded the final phase of Bowie’s recording career, a stately chapter that did away with costume and pose and drew attention to his writing chops, if not his performance élan. After the madcap art-fuckery of 1995’s outstanding Outside and the nervy approximation of jungle and Cool Britannia that begat ‘97’s Eart hl i ng, Bowie cut the tempo and dropped the gaudy presentation.
He wouldn’t tour Hours… in the traditional sense, preferring instead a series of T.V. appearances, many of which were programmed to allow him the opportunity to stretch out for an hour or more.
Now remember, Bowie had retired his best-known songs in 1990. For the balance of the decade, he cherry-picked from the old RCA LPs, which led to some delightful surprises on the touring circuit, but the biggest shock dropped in ‘99 when he used VH1’s Storytellers forum to dip back further than ever before.
Amused references to 1967’s novelty single “The Laughing Gnome” aside, Bowie’s early stylistic fumbles never got any mainstream press, and he didn’t help matters by studiously avoiding the dozens of songs he’d issued before 1969’s “Space Oddity.” This all changed on August 23, 1999, when Bowie announced “Can’t Help Thinking About Me” to the Storytellers studio audience.
In 1966, “Can’t Help Thinking About Me” was a derivative bit of beat pop that snuck into the lower reaches of the chart not by virtue of its revved-up chorus or confessional wordplay, but through the efforts of team Bowie, who rigged its #34 chart peak in Melody Maker and got the 19-year-old a slot on Ready! Steady! Go! Nothing came of the manufactured brush with success and Bowie went under for another spell. It’d be three years before the moon came calling. You know the rest.
In 2000, Bowie set to recording about a dozen of his own sixties nuggets for the prospective Toy LP. Label indifference quashed the project, and Bowie let a few songs trickle out as B-sides in 2002-03. Interestingly, it’s not as though Toy was a desperate ploy from a dried-up writer: Bowie issued strong original albums in both 2002 and 2003. It seems as though he just genuinely enjoyed digging way back into his vault for this stuff. Toy can be found in the blogosphere, if you know where to look.
A clearer clip of the Storytellers performance is here, but I linked to the one above because it’s got the disarming preamble.
The 1966 original - the definitive version, of course - is here. It’s not the R!S!G! video - I’m pretty sure the footage got wiped by the BBC, as per practices of the day.
