1/7/2024 0 Comments Lazarus david bowieWhately said Bowie would consume a book a day. It was an exchange mainly of book and film recommendations, everything from Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz to the 1973 BBC documentary series The Ascent of Man. Whately and Bowie had known each other for almost two decades, having worked together on a short film at the beginning of Whately’s career, and the pair regularly kept in touch over email. “However, he must have known there was a chance he wasn’t going to recover, so, to do an album with a certain amount of ambiguity in it, is Bowie playing the cat and mouse game that he always played.” I don’t think he knew he was going to die.īowie in his own words: highlights from his TV interviews Guardian There is more ambiguity there than people want to acknowledge. “People are so desperate for Blackstar to be this parting gift that Bowie made for the world when he knew he was dying but I think it’s simplistic to think that. “I still don’t know if he started making Blackstar before he knew he was ill, or after,” he said. Whately describes as “simplistic” the narrative adopted by the media after Bowie died, that Blackstar was the singer’s deliberate parting gift to fans. “He’d had his life picked over for 40 years and he thought he had said everything he wanted to say, there was nothing more.” “I don’t find it strange he kept his illness so private,” said Whately. Whately says Bowie would have liked to have moved back to London, but stayed in New York for the relative anonymity it allowed him. The documentary also explores Bowie’s increasingly uncomfortable relationship with fame, which he had embraced at the beginning of his career as a means to gain creative freedom, but in later years he came to loathe.Īfter a heart attack in 2003, he took himself almost entirely out of the public eye. Was he a man who took on these multiple projects because he sensed his time was running out? “We just don’t know,” said Whately. We all now know he was ill, we know he was undergoing treatment, but it doesn’t seem to have had an effect at all on his output.” There are musicians in the Blackstar band who didn’t even know. “I think everyone would like me to say he was turning up to the studio to record Blackstar and he was terribly ill, but I don’t think he was. It was quite an extraordinary workload,” said Whately. “Often he would go and record in the studio and then go and watch the rehearsals for Lazarus in the evening, or talk about the play in the morning, go to the studio, and then come back. Whately emphasised how much energy Bowie had thrown into his final three projects, particularly Blackstar and Lazarus, right up until his death. He had only shared news of his illness with those closest to him, and those collaborators who needed to know for professional reasons, such as Lazarus producer Robert Fox and his long-time friend and collaborator Tony Visconti, who both also appear in the documentary. “In some ways he seems to have worked harder in that period than at almost any other time, except the beginning of the 1970s when he was producing Ziggy Stardust, Hunky Dory and Aladdin Sane.”īowie’s death came as a shock to the world. “This period hadn’t been explored by anybody so it was very interesting territory,” Whately told the Guardian. The latest Whately documentary looks in depth at the making of Bowie’s surprise 2013 album, The Next Day, his 2016 jazz-infused album Blackstar, which was released days before he died, and his first stage musical, Lazarus. In the programme he recalls one of the last exchanges the pair had, after the play made its debut in New York in 2015. Yet even then, Bowie had not given up hope of surviving his cancer and was still keen to make new work just weeks before he died, according to Ivo Van Hove, who directed Bowie’s musical, Lazarus. “I found out later that, the week we were shooting, it was when he was told it was over, they were ending treatments and that his illness had won,” said Renck. “To me it had to do with the biblical aspect of it. “I immediately said ‘the song is called Lazarus, you should be in the bed’,” says Renck. He insists the common interpretation of the video – that the singer was hinting that he was on his deathbed – is wrong, because he came up with the concept a week before Bowie received his final diagnosis. “David said: ‘I just want to make it a simple performance video’,” said Johan Renck who directed the video, which features Bowie singing lines such as “Look up here, I’m in heaven” from a hospital bed. Bowie died on 10 January 2016, days after turning 69 and the release of his 25th studio album, Blackstar, having kept his illness a secret from the world.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |