by When people talk about the environmental muses which influenced the life and times of David Bowie, they’re quick to cite either south London or Berlin. New York is often a place that’s overlooked.
But for all the big lights and even bigger dreams that the city holds within its walls, it’s a place more commonly associated with a classic theatrical glamour; think of Frank Sinatra painting the grand illusion of “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere”. What’s sometimes left unsaid is that in the underbelly of the place is a real rocker’s hub, a hive of activity, where Bowie almost positioned himself as the elusive artistic reverend for the best part of a quarter of a century.
Indeed, over the span of 13 years beginning from the late 1990s, the once effervescent Starman made himself pretty scarce. He made certain appearances – opening the Concert for New York City in October 2001, following the 9/11 attacks, for example – but after suffering a heart attack on stage in Hamburg in 2004, he largely retreated into domesticity with his wife Iman and daughter Lexi for almost a decade.
You would think, at first, that New York would perhaps be the worst place possible to do this in. It’s one of the most populous cities in the world with a proclivity for drama and stardom to boot. It was a place that made rock stars like Debbie Harry and David Byrne, but also broke them, as in the murder of John Lennon, and generally, from the outside, has never seemed all that forgiving. It’s hardly the environment you would consider for a wellness retreat.
But for Bowie, he seemed to find a certain sense of calm amid the chaos. He found a little oasis at his home in the Nolita area of downtown Manhattan, where he was able to truly dedicate himself to being a devoted husband and father, perhaps for one of the first times since the rocket of ‘Space Oddity’ launched into the stratosphere in 1969. For all the craziness of New York, its throngs of residents, tourists, and everyone in between were what granted Bowie a sense of anonymity – and, in some ways, he was probably quite satisfied with that.
However, in 2013, something changed. Suddenly, Bowie was abuzz with ideas again, in a way he had not been for a period of over a decade prior, and almost without realising it at the time, New York became the essential muse on which the final chapter of his life and work hinged. This was a frenzied time which began with The Next Day and ended tragically in his unexpected death from cancer on January 10th, 2016 – but although seemingly across such a short span, it was perhaps the most essential period for understanding the legacy and impact Bowie would leave behind.
Both The Next Day and Blackstar were created and recorded in full at The Magic Shop studio, only a few blocks away from his home. That might seem at odds with what we know now about those albums, particularly the latter, in that Bowie was not only confronting but darkly embracing the concept of morbidity and mortality, while only telling very few people that he was actually himself terminally ill.
To have that impending sense of death and despair so physically and figuratively close to your doorstep may have been too terrifying and simply unachievable for some. Yet for Bowie, it almost seemed like catharsis in letting some of his deepest, darkest demons free, and ultimately making peace with his own present demise.
However, following that narrative in terms of his final albums is only really telling part of the story. Running concurrently to this throughout the entire period was an affinity to the dramatic arts and the theatre – fitting, given the encroaching Broadway landscape of the city – that led to Bowie’s final play, Lazarus, opening in New York on December 7th, 2015, merely a month before he passed away.
Clearly, despite the singer having embodied a theatrical persona of his own throughout the years, whether it was in Ziggy Stardust or even as himself, he felt his final gift to the world should not only be via his music, but by leaving a subtle imprint of his kaleidoscopic mind on the stage. Indeed, where the decline of his health permitted, Bowie was an active part of the creative process for Lazarus – turning up at rehearsals in a tiny studio in the New York Theatre Workshop, messily scrawling notes in pencil. Very few, if any, of those involved alongside him on the project knew that he would barely live to see it through.
But more than intentionally leaving Blackstar and Lazarus as parting gifts, Bowie never saw the approach of the end of his life with any sort of finality. Those closest to him will confirm that he was floating ideas for a follow-up to the album even just days before his death, and a recent discovery, as his prized belongings head to be displayed at the V&A storehouse in London, revealed notes on an 18th-century London musical called The Spectator he was plotting, locked in a safe in his New York office.
To say that Bowie’s work ethic was energetic and almost ethereal is true, but would almost be over-simplifying its significance during that final time period. Although he hardly referenced the place itself by name, the fact that New York was the setting in which the star retreated and then suddenly re-emerged should not be so readily dismissed.
Not only that, but the fact that he kept everything – family, work, knowledge of his illness – in such close quarters despite the throngs of the city speaks volumes about the insular creative communities that New York can still cultivate within its vastness. Ultimately, after being away from the spotlight for the better part of the decade of the 2000s, being in constant proximity to that cultural hotbed was bound to build up some fractious energy for Bowie.
In the end, the cannon was fired when he started recording for The Next Day, and never stopped until the world physically took him away. Bowie may have been no Sinatra in truly epitomising the spirit of one singular place over the course of his seismic career – but if there’s anything that those last few years showed most clearly, in his eyes, it was New York or nowhere.
