David Bowie 1995: This Time He Really WAS In Newcastle!
In the early 90s, being a Bowie fan was hard work.
In the music press he was seen as being over the hill, a washed-up rocker resorting to a money grabbing greatest hits tour after the critical disaster of his loud, back-to-basics Tin Machine project.
The record buying public weren't too keen on Tin Machine, either - the second album sunk without much of a trace in late 1991. I'll still speak up for Tin Machine 2; the 7" mix of You Belong In Rock n Roll is one of my favourite Bowie singles of the 90s and there's a handful of brilliant tracks on the album - great Bowie moments like Baby Universal, Amlapura and Shopping For Girls.
But also, in late 1993 he managed to sneak another album into the shops. And hardly anybody took any notice. It was billed as the soundtrack to a BBC show called The Buddha of Suburbia but it was actually the strangest album Bowie had made for well over a decade.
I remember reading the liner notes for The Buddha of Suburbia album - he claimed to have written and recorded the whole thing in just six days. And it was fantastic - full of manic energy, bizarre lyrics and wonky piano solos. And there was at least one instant classic - the slightly trippy and very wistful 'Strangers When We Meet'.
For the first time since 1977 (the year of Low and "Heroes") Bowie released two albums in 1993. I have to admit, I loved both and played them to death.
It felt like Bowie was cool again; prolific, arty and a bit bonkers. I was already looking forward to what he'd do next - I assumed he'd release another album or maybe tour in 1994.
But then he disappeared again.
For nearly two years.
In Summer 1995 it was announced that he was working with Brian Eno again and they were making a series of albums - possibly a trilogy, possibly even more - in the run up to the year 2000.
As if to prove it, the first album had the number '1' as part of the title - presumably so we could expect numbers '2' and '3' in the near future. Sadly, we're still waiting for those. But what we did get was some fucking strange music and a brilliant, arty concert tour.
'1.Outside' sounded like nothing else in 1995.
This was at the height of the Blur/Oasis/Elastica/Pulp Britpop boom - and many of those bands cited Bowie as an influence - but what the hell was '1.Outside' supposed to be?
A lot of the music press expected a return to the sounds of the Bowie/Eno collaborations from the 1970s and slaughtered the new album for being 'too long', 'too dark' and 'tuneless'.
Bowie wasn't presenting a new character as he had with Ziggy Stardust or The Thin White Duke - this time he was presenting half a dozen new characters and giving them all weird, sci-fi spoken interludes. Was this a stroke of genius or a horrible mistake?
The album was actually difficult to listen to - apart from the spoken segues there were also creepy arrangements on songs such as A Small Plot of Land and Wishful Beginnings.
These weren't the sort of things you'd want to listen to alone or late at night. But there was also a gorgeous new version of Strangers When We Meet - so maybe Bowie realised the song deserved a wider audience than The Buddha of Suburbia soundtrack had afforded it.
I came to realise this might be the closest I'd ever come to the 'what the hell did I just listen to?' moment that Bowie fans must have experienced with Diamond Dogs in 1974 or Low in 1977. Bowie was experimenting and refusing to play it safe. He was back! Fuck, yeah!
I was very lucky - I saw two shows on the UK leg of the Outside Tour. In November a friend invited me down to London to see one of the Wembley shows. Our seats were right at the back of the Arena but it was a magnificent performance.
As well as great chunks of the Outside album, Bowie thundered through lesser known gems from his back catalogue. Look Back In Anger and Scary Monsters seemed to burst angrily out of the stage, while the updated arrangements of The Man Who Sold the World and Andy Warhol sounded nothing like the originals.
Bowie was giving us some of his classics but very much on his terms. There'd been some bad reviews of his Greatest Hits Tour in 1990 - the music press had chuckled to itself about time and cigarettes wrecking Bowie's voice (he'd struggled with the falsetto sections of Ashes to Ashes by all accounts) but on that night at Wembley he was firing on all cylinders.
Most of the audience - and the Arena was only about 2/3 full - enjoyed Under Pressure and Boys Keep Swinging but didn't seem all that bothered about everything else. Even when the band unleashed a barnstorming Moonage Daydream at the very end of the show (a song from Ziggy Stardust for fuck's sake!) the crowd just didn't seem to engage with it. Were people expecting to hear Let's Dance or Starman? Even if he had performed those songs he'd have probably twisted them to fit alongside his new material.
The Outside tracks such as I Have Not Been To Oxford Town, Hallo Spaceboy and The Heart's Filthy Lesson seemed to make much more sense performed live. They were intense and starkly lit - sometimes it felt as if Bowie was deliberately trying to scare some of the audience away. I loved every creepy, awkward minute.
I immediately booked tickets for the Newcastle show in December.
We managed to get right to the front of the crowd. We were standing below the huge bank of speakers that hung from the ceiling - and it felt like I could reach out and touch the very edge of the stage.
My brother said he needed the toilet, so I told him I'd keep our place in front of the stage. After a few minutes I spotted my brother - he hadn't gone to the toilet, he'd drifted off into the crowd... Was he trying to get even closer to the stage? It didn't seem possible. We already had a great spot - and that's when I realised: he'd dumped me! He wanted to enjoy this show and he'd decided to put some distance between us. This was an evening my brother intended to spend with David* and I was obviously surplus to requirements.
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I'd organised the trip and paid for his ticket - but more importantly I was trying to put things right. Did he think he wouldn't enjoy this show if he was standing next to me? Was he expecting a repeat of Roker Park in 1987? I was 22 in 1995, but big brother obviously thought I'd cramp his style.
Well, fuck him.
Seeing the band at such close quarters was very, very special. All of those faces from old concert videos and album sleeves - Carlos Alomar, Reeves Gabrels, Mike Garson - it was like seeing a living rock'n'roll museum. In a good way.
Bowie himself was extraordinary. He was a wiry, spiky presence - and although he confessed to suffering with a flu bug, he was in fine voice throughout the show. His face was lined and his stubble was grey - but Bowie was ageing gracefully. During the nineties he also seemed determined to recapture his pioneering spirit.
But there were moments in the show when he cut a slightly tragic figure. I realised Bowie's choice of songs seemed to centre on the themes of loss and death. Was The Man Who Sold The World a reference to Kurt Cobain? Nirvana had covered the song not long before Cobain had took his own life... Andy Warhol was being performed live for the first time since the titular artist had passed away... Jump They Say was a song Bowie admitted he'd written about the suicide of his older brother, Terry... Bowie was also performing Under Pressure as part of his setlist for the very first time - was it a coincidence that this was his first solo tour since the loss of Freddie Mercury? Even the long, blistering guitar solos of the final number, Moonage Daydream, seemed to highlight loss... The originator of those solos, Mick Ronson, had succumbed to cancer just a couple of years earlier.
During the Wembley show he'd also performed My Death, a Jacques Brel song last performed by Bowie on the Ziggy Stardust shows in 1973. Sadly, it was missing from the setlist by the time he played Newcastle, but mortality had clearly on Bowie's mind when preparing the tour.
Was Bowie paying tribute to his fallen family, friends and fellow artists with his choice of songs? Was he standing defiantly in the face of all this death? Was he raging against the dying of the light? Maybe he didn't want to waste any more time with crowd pleasing records and greatest hits tours.
Maybe I was reading too much into it. But it was a great show. And strangely moving.
I didn't say much to my brother on the journey home. He just sat there ashen faced as the coach driver put a Freddie Starr tape on to 'entertain' us as we made the short trip back to Darlington.
7 years later, my brother was living in Manchester and managed to get tickets for a Bowie concert at the Old Trafford cricket ground. I wondered if he was planning to invite me along...
But I should have known better. Maybe he didn't want to share any more of his 'David' moments with me. Maybe he was still bitter about his restricted view of the Glass Spider in Sunderland. Or more likely, he just didn't give me a second thought. I didn't care. I felt as if I'd paid him back.
By the early noughties Bowie was back to playing his greatest hits and was suddenly flavour of the month for celebrity fans. Jonathan Ross, Chris Evans and Michael Parkinson were quite happy to host Bowie on their chat shows as long as he was belting out Life On Mars or China Girl - they probably wouldn't have been so keen on The Heart's Filthy Lesson or We Prick You.
I realised I much preferred the 'difficult' Bowie of the mid-nineties. It was hard work being a fan of those records but it was worth it.
*My brother had this really fucking annoying habit of referring to famous people by their first names. He'd say he was thrilled because 'David' had a new album coming out, or he'd say he was looking forward to 'Jeanette's' new novel or 'Alan's' new BBC play. Why did he think he was on first name terms with famous people? Fuck only knows. He also started smoking just because Bowie did. Tosser.
