The Next Day (2013)

The Bowie Project #30 – The Next Day (2013)

In the early 2000s David Bowie’s career had something of a resurgence, the release of the albums Heathen and Reality and the reconciliation with longtime producer Tony Visconti had restored his critical standing that for quite a few years had been in question. His songwriting was strong, he enjoyed performing live, he had cemented his role as a legend in the music industry and with a run of two strong album’s it looked like this wasn't going to slow down anytime soon. In 2003, he hit the road for what would be the longest tour in his entire career with plans to play to more than one million people across 17 countries, Bowie started to appear regularly on our TV screens making appearances on German and French television stations, Friday Night with Jonathan Ross on the BBC, The Today Show, Last Call with Carson Daly, The Late Show with David Letterman and more. He would perform new and old music and it seems like he felt content to entertain the masses and give the people what they want. This was before it all ch-ch-changed.

On June 23 2004, while on stage in Prague, Bowie had a heart attack that at the time was misdiagnosed as a pinched nerve that forced him to end the show early. Then, on June 25, at the Hurricane music festival in Germany he had to leave early again as a result of great discomfort. The next day he was diagnosed with a blocked artery that required immediate surgery and on June 30 the rest of the tour was cancelled entirely including a performance at the Oxygen music festival in Ireland. In the years following his recovery Bowie reduced his appearances greatly, there would never be another tour and he would occasionally make one-off performances on stage or in the studio. In 2006, he said I’m taking a year out, no albums, no tours, and then in November of that year he made what would turn out to be the last performance of his own music on stage at Hammerstein Ballroom in New York, although in 2007 he did make one final appearance introducing Ricky Gervais at Madison Square Garden and singing a version of “Little Fat Man” a song he had performed in the Gervais comedy series Extras, and that was that for Bowie on stage.

Things got even quieter in the years that lay ahead, in 2008 he performed on Scarlett Johansson’s Tom Waits cover album, he provided voice work on the animated movie Arthur and the Invisibles and an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, as well as some minor cameo appearances in a few things but for the most part that was it, he didn’t grant interviews and he wasn’t working on any music, he was essentially retired and as the 2000s turned into the 2010s people started to accept that maybe that was the end of the road for David Bowie.

However, unbeknownst to the rest of the world in November 2010 Bowie contacted producer Tony Visconti out of the blue about wanting to record some demos for new music. Within the few days they are in the studio working on songs that Bowie had been quietly crafting over the years, they recorded the songs and Bowie vanished again until the next year when he began to search for a new studio where he could record in absolute secrecy, in order to ensure word wouldn’t get out about the new project Bowie made everyone involved, the band members, the engineers, people bringing coffee to sign non-disclosure agreements for what would become one of the first surprise album drops of the era something that would be mimicked by artists like Beyonce on some of her following records like Lemonade in 2016.

When the first single dropped in early 2013, it came as a complete shock as with the rise of the internet and social media in the intervening years Bowie was determined to keep everything under wraps meaning he could abandon the project if he was not satisfied with it, but thankfully, The Next Day, finally arrived on March 8, 2013. Bowie’s publicist Alan Edwards stated: “They wanted it to look like there had been no pre-planning. This thing was going to just drop from the sky – David Bowie just reappears. This is a serious cultural moment.” The artwork for the record led to some confusion among fans as it is essentially the cover to his 1977 album “Heroes” with a giant white square on top it and the words The Next Day. The cover is in a way a homage to his past but also a signifier that this is something new, the lyrics to the song “Heroes” states, “we can be heroes, just for one day” and what we have here is the next day, what comes after.

Even the first song, the title track of this record, feels oddly reminiscent of the “Heroes” album first song “Beauty and the Beast” with a pulsating groove and funky backbeat it seems to suggest we are about to be welcomed to something new, but he is not ignoring the influence of his past he is instead embracing it. The song and its accompanying music video attracted great controversy for its perceived blasphemy and features French actress Marion Cotillard and English actor Gary Oldman. Oldman plays a dirty priest who dances with women in the bar and Cotillard plays a woman who is struck with stigmata as blood pours out of her hand while Bowie himself seems to be portraying some sort of Christ-like figure who is singing in the bar and before he eventually disappears or possibly ascends away at the end. The video was banned from YouTube just two hours after it came out before reappearing (like Christ?) with an age restriction. It was heavily criticised by religious organisation with Bill Donohue, leader of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights saying it was the work of “a switch-hitting, bisexual, senior citizen from London”. It’s a great opening track; it really gets things moving right out the gate and Bowie’s vocals sound powerful and strong after his long absence. The lyrics themselves seem to be a tongue-in-cheek response to the rumours over the last number of years that he had been in ill-health, with his withdrawal from public life many had speculated for a long time that he was not well with the lyrics stating: “Here I am, not quite dying, my body left to rot in a hollow tree.”

 As a messianic figure in “The Next Day” music video

With a slower pace “Dirty Boys” sounds like it could have been an Iggy Pop track from back in the Berlin era with Tony Visconti describing it as sleazy, dark, and sexy and a song “for all the glam rock stars that have ever been”. The track features prominent baritone saxophone played by Steve Elson who he had worked with as far back as Let’s Dance. The song was influenced by street gangs something which Bowie had become particularly enamoured with later in life even becoming fascinated with the BBC series Peaky Blinders leading to its star Cillian Murphy gifting him a Blinder flat cap for Christmas and after his death having his music featured in the show.

The second single for the record is “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” and it tackles a theme that Bowie has been singing about since the beginnings of career the nature of fame, his old alter ego Ziggy Stardust was a bold statement on the trappings of seeking fame, he sang with John Lennon on 1975’s “Fame” about how jaded and soulless the pursuit was, and now all these years later he is still speaking of the sexless and unaroused stars who we will never be rid of. Drummer Zachary Alford when speaking of the song said “I don’t think he was struggling with his fame anymore. I think he was taking the piss. He was noticing how it was already bad enough when he wrote ‘Fame’ and now our society is falling deeper into the abyss of celebrity worship and there are way more people now who are famous just for being famous.” This here is a look at fame from the perspective of someone who has lived it and for the last decade attempted to walk away from it, it’s about the relationship between fans and their idols, how celebrities feed on their followers like vampires in the night with Bowie stating back in 1993 that fame has been one of the banes of his life and has stopped him from being able to develop proper relationships with people. The music video features Bowie and actress Tilda Swinton as suburban couple stalked by younger Bowiesque lookalikes, it deals with ageing and mortality, your memories and glory and the struggle to live a so-called normal life when that’s what you want.

Bowie with Tidla Swinton

“Love is Lost” was the fifth and final single from this album and the song is full of images of relocation and exile with Bowie singing about being in love under witness protection and the confined life and loneliness that comes with this. The song opens interestingly with the lines “in your darkest hour, when you are 22” which is age that Bowie wrote and released his first hit “Space Oddity” indicating an acknowledgement that this where one life of his ended and another began “the darkness hour and your voice is new” it seems to be full of regret like maybe this career he has embarked on was the wrong idea, like maybe he would have been a happier man if he didn’t spend his youth courting fame and his later years running away from it, a prisoner of his own making. “Love is Lost” was at one point a potential title for this album further indicating how well it feeds into the overall themes of the record. The first indication anyone got about this album’s existence was the lead single “Where Are We Now?” a song recorded entirely in secret between September and October 2011 at the Magic Shop in New York City. The song was then released as a surprise single on January 8, 2013, Bowie’s 66th birthday. It appeared with no warning on iTunes for fans to discover and reached number six in the UK charts making it his most successful single since “Absolute Beginners” in 1986 and the last top 10 hit in his lifetime. The lyrics are simple but effective featuring an older person reminiscing about time well spent and time wasted and is a melancholy look back on his Berlin period but the city that inspired “Heroes” is no more and it is an examination of all that changes over time. Bowie sounds older in this track, looking inward, and when the song was released considering rumours of his ill health many saw it as a final goodbye from the artist. The fourth single from the album is “Valentine’s Day” a song about a high school massacre told from the perspective of the perpetrator with Tony Visconti stating it is ultimately about mental health issues and what is going on inside the head of a shooter. It seems the character of Valentine in this song is one that stuck with Bowie because in 2015 that was the name of the character who haunts Thomas Jerome Newman in his musical Lazarus. In the play Valentine is described as the most ordinary of men, a person with little confidence withdrawn into invisibility and in search of a friend. For me, there’s something special about this song and it’s one of my favourite moments on the whole record, the way the characters are named gives it all something extra, Bowie biographer Chris O’Leary also comment on how Valentine’s victims “Terry and Judy down” echo the Terry and Julie found on the Kinks track “Waterloo Sunset”, lovers in the Ray Davies track, they’re bodies in a classroom. Dead centre in the middle of the album is “If You Can See Me” which has distorted vocals that reminds of work found on Bowie’s 1995 concept album Outside. This song features Bowie at his most sonically aggressive on the record with complex lyricism and apocalyptic imagery as the song moves along it starts to feel epic in its grandiosity and I think takes a couple of listens to really get into. It’s a powerful track. Alluding to Bowie’s previous drug use “I’d Rather Be High” is about a seventeen-year-old soldier seeking mental escape by daydreaming he was anywhere else but “training these guns for those men in the sand”. In a modern context you’d be thinking of the Iraq War or the conflict in Afghanistan, but references sprinkled throughout put this in question such as the allusion to The Gift, a 1938 novel written by Vladimir Nabokov written in Berlin that could have this take place at the beginning of World War II. Bowie was born in 1947 just after the end of that conflict and it could also be viewed as a track examining the broken men of this era how didn’t live in a world where it was comfortable to express their feelings, or more broadly civilisations betrayal of their youth, send them to do the dirty work for them and then leave them broken and alone with nothing but the vices of sex and drugs to fill the bottomless void. “The Boss of Me” is a song Bowie co-wrote with Irish guitarist Gerry Leonard who came up with it’s central riff and chord structure. Many reviews have described this as the album’s weakest moment for being, in the words of Chris O’Leary, “hackneyed and unoriginal”. It’s been read as praise to the power of fortitude of his Somali born wife Iman, although growing up in Nairobi I don’t think you could call her a small-town girl and it is more likely about dealing with issues around refugees and displaced people. “Dancing Out in Space” to me probably is the album’s weakest moments and when it’s said that Bowie originally had 25 potential tracks for this record it’s kind of surprising this one made the cut and could have worked better as B-side or bonus track down the line, it just feels like it lacks the substance of the much of the rest of the record. The hook is a little bit catchy, classic Bowie reference to space, and it’s full of cryptic allusions to figures like Georges Rodenbach, a Belgian Symbolist poet active in the late 1800s. Maybe there’s more underneath the surface but I have not found it. Another war track “How Does the Grass Grow?” juxtaposes life before and after atrocity and is quietly one of the album’s great songs. The backing vocal refrain of “ya ya yay a” was swiped from the Shadows 1960 track “Apache” and it’s been compared in structure to his late 70s single “Boys Keep Swinging”. The song features Bowie at his most confrontational and angry, never one to be outright political. It seems these are now thoughts that weigh heavily on his mind and he feels a need to speak about a world that feels increasingly broken. Bowie biographer Chris O’Leary commented that what thematically links this song to the rest of The Next Day is an interest in the doomed teenagers of multiple generations whether you’re growing up in Middle East in the present day, had your sense of self crumble without support in the WWII era, or the younger version of Bowie himself who gave up the possibility of a happy ordinary life when he devoted himself to becoming a star. Reminiscent of some of his 1980s work the rocker “(You Will) Set the World on Fire” that feels a little bit like the second coming of the Iggy Pop cover “Bang Bang” from Never Let Me Down. This track takes place in Greenwich Village during the protests of the 1960s and a female folk singer who gets discovered at that time. Bowie was a fan of this era as it just predates his start in his music and he would have been looking closely at what was happening in the States at that time. A candidate for the inspiration of this track could be Odetta with the line “when the black girl and guitar burn together hot in a rage”. Often referred to as the voice of the civil rights movement, Odetta was an important figure in the folk-revival movement of that time and influenced everyone from Bob Dylan to Joan Baez, to Janis Joplin with Rosa Parks stating she was her number one fan and Martin Luther King Jr. calling her the queen of American music. The song is also a subtle homage to Bob Dylan and in a way bookends the tribute he gave him way back in on Hunky Dory’s “Song for Bob Dylan”. The relationship between Bowie and Dylan wasn’t always a positive one as it's said Bob was not a fan of him during his cocaine years in the 70s and Bowie was critical of his work in the later part of the 70s as well. It seems they managed to bury the hatchet and develop a great respect for each other and it’s rumoured Bob even wanted Bowie to produce his Infidels album for him back in 1983. Taking influence from the past “You Feel so Lonely You Could Die” utilises the drumbeat from “Five Years” and has hints of “Rock n’ Roll Suicide” from Ziggy Stardust, the slow finger picked guitar and lyricism also calls to mind Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and it all comes together powerfully as we prepare for the end of the record. Opening with the line “no one ever saw you” it’s a track that uses the imagery of assassins and treachery to explore the old Bowie theme of loneliness, isolation and despair once again. Asking as much of this record does, was it all worth it? The dramatic closing number is “Heat” which sees Bowie singing in a deep sonorous voice that almost draws you into a trance. The refrain “my father ran the prison” seems to imply a backstory that remains elusive and by the end of the song we’re as confused as we were going in. Tony Visconti questioned whether it was discussing being in a real prison, a prison of the mind and was so curious he asked Bowie for an explanation around the track and he said that it’s not about himself, that none of these songs are and he’s simply an observer. Whatever Bowie himself feels, and I doubt that’s true because his music has always been an internal exploration of the self, this closing track feels like a glimpse into the mentality of a searching man who after a lifetime is still grasping for meaning and willing to go down dark roads to find it. When the album was released it received extremely positive reviews and was hailed as Bowie’s strongest album in decades with Andy Gill from the Independent calling it “the greatest comeback album in rock n’ roll history” and the New York Times calling it Bowie’s twilight masterpiece. It was innovative and creative but most importantly it felt urgent and genuine, this was an album of music that he felt compelled to release, that after being away for so long had to come out, it was an artistic statement that confirmed once again Bowie could stand with the best of them in the modern era. Some however did say it was a little overlong and it is true that some songs are a lot better than others which I might have to agree with somewhat. Bowie gave no interviews to coincide with the album’s release, but he did break his silence on occasion and send novelist Rick Moody a list of 42 words to help elucidate its themes. Moody then wrote a 12,000-review using Bowie’s own words to break down the album: "Effigies, Indulgences, Anarchist, Violence, Chthonic, Intimidation, Vampyric, Pantheon, Succubus, Hostage, Transference, Identity, Mauer, Interface, Flitting, Isolation, Revenge, Osmosis, Crusade, Tyrant, Domination, Indifference, Miasma, Pressgang, Displaced, Flight, Resettlement, Funereal, Glide, Trace, Balkan, Burial, Reverse, Manipulate, Origin, Text, Traitor, Urban, Comeuppance, Tragic, Nerve, Mystification.” But the hype around Bowie was well and truly back and there was great excitement over his triumphant return and what this would mean for the rest of his career, was it a one-off surprise release or could we expect a new album each year like back in 1970s, was he going to tour the album or promote it with interviews and appearances, what was next for the Thin White Duke? Well as I am sure many of you already know that story is a tragic one, there was no tour or appearances and there was no grand re-entrance into public life, because the following year Bowie began a private battle that we would not become privy to until it was all over, although that was not before he left us with one parting gift, and what a beautiful gift it was, but more on that the next day.

The Next Day - ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ [8/10]