“Bowie manifesto: Innovate, play, be modern, bend boundaries, think visually, gear shift, surf the moment, be euphoric, read, scare yourself, astonish.” Filmmaker Mark Cousins, Twitter, 11/01/2016
I received a VHS of Serious Moonlight out of the ‘letric blue around '02, when 80s pop was - to put it lightly - not in vogue for NME-reading teens in the UK. I was genuinely baffled. My mother still has no memory of giving it to me, and she was never liked DB.
It was not the Bowie I’d known up ‘til that point; indeed, everything hearkened back to an alien era of unabashed commercialism, flush with superficial Reaganite optimism, powder blue 1930s zoot suits, analogue synthesizer popcraft, gated drums and a lacquered, peroxide pompadour that ‘a hurricane couldn’t move’... This was an era that the witless turn-of-the-century (and soon to be redundant) music press consensus had left me feeling to be almost taboo, a cultural wasteland.
... So I dove in to squint my way through hours of fuzzy, shot-on-video, funked-up 1980s pomp. This was old (three years older than me), yet it might as well have been made that week. And in that context, with not another DB fan in sight, it also felt like my little secret. This otherwise typical, early example of the concert VHS, of an artist grafting through his big commercial comeback with a global stadium tour, became quite important to me.
At that point I likely just owned the 1999 EMI reissues of Ziggy and Man Who Sold the World; but in this video each song was introduced with a panel showing the album on which it had appeared. Off the back of this, I would discover the Berlin/France/Switzerland trilogy, Scary Monsters, Station to Station...
... And so I was hurled into more new worlds, new horizons of possibility, new dreams - all from deep in my room, my blue-blue room.
gummygunk
theartofmadeline
vaporwave
stormborns
