Transcription
You mentioned, first off, during the press conference that the new record was your most optimistic yet. Yes, yeah. What did you mean by that?
Um, I don't know. What did I mean by—I'm asking the questions here. Can I ask you some punishing questions a bit later?
Be my guest. Okay, come back to this one. Um, I—it occurred to me that a lot of things that I've done, um, though I wouldn't uh uh deny them, have been um pretty much uh in a direction of um singularity and isolationist and quite cold. Um, and I just felt that, having been two years since I've been away from the recording studio, it occurred to me, listening back to my own music and seeing what's happening in modern music at the moment, that I wanted to do something with the kind of warmth that I feel missing from um music generally and and and and from society.
Um, that sounds like a very overblown statement. Indeed it is. What I'm trying to say is that it's probably one of the warmer things that I've done. I was going to—it sounds like a real Rel—relative—relatively—that's the important word here.
Yeah. I guess there'll always be something spiky about my stuff, but it's—there's a—I think a wanting to integrate back into society, and that comes through. I think that becomes apparent.
Would this all come out of things that have been happening to you personally?
Of course, yes. Do you want to say what—if there was any one thing that might have happened that might have—
Well, I met her on—on a Sunday, and my heart stood—no, I wish I could say that, but that never happened either. Uh, but uh, I—I just felt a lot more balanced about my personal life; about musically, I—I um rekindled the kind of enthusiasm I think that I had um 10 years ago, and I wanted to start really making music. But I think it's more positive for me; the outlook is positive. I wanted—if I was going to even bother writing anything anymore—that I would really want to contribute something um optimistic and positive.
Do you have a title for the album?
Um, tentatively yes, but we'll probably go with it completely—well, I would hate to put out a working title and then not—because that gets confusing. I think uh probably we'll really decide by the end of this week what it is. I—of course, we'll let you know first. We appreciate—
What about some—if you won't give us the LP title, some song titles?
Not—question—not giving it. I'd love to give it to you, but there are three, and we're going to settle on one by the end of this week. It—it'd be confusing if I give you all three. So—
Okay. How about some—how about a song title or two?
I—I have heard that uh that you've chosen to rework "Cat People" on the record. That was one of the ideas. Yes.
Um, has that—not happen?
Well, I—we did a number of things, and a final decision on that and which ones we're actually going to put out uh again be at the end of the week.
Who's producing the record?
Myself and Nile Rodgers from Chic. Um, and uh occasionally Bernard Edwards stepped in to listen.
How did you decide on—on that sort of a production team rather than Tony Visconti?
Uh, well, I—is because I wanted to redefine everything I did. I think I also wanted to be in a position where I didn't know the people that I was working with—to redevelop the kind of enthusiasm and and and slight panic that you have when you're not sure how the other person is going to react to any situation. Um, I—I had many, many wonderful experiences working with Carlos and Dennis Davis and George Murray, um, but I really wanted to start working with new people. So—because you kind of get to a position as a musician where if you have an idea and you know your musicians that you're working with too well, um there's a signal going on over there. Sorry.
No, not at all. You sit—that's right. We want to see you—that there comes—there comes a point where if you know your musicians too well, you can almost predict the way they're going to interpret or play something, and that—for me personally—takes some of the fascination of making music away. I like to be kind of really surprised each time.
Who you mentioned musicians, and I was going to ask you about them anyway. You've chosen—oh, that's a—n—why—why N—I mean Nile—I met Nile in a club a few months ago. Um, we started talking about music, and and we got back inevitably to rhythm and blues, where all musicians get back to, however elitist they seem superficially. Um, and we had exactly the same taste in in early rhythm and blues guitarists and big bands and whatever from that period, and it just struck me at that point—said, "God, I'd be going to maybe work with him."
I wonder if that gives us any clue as to what the album may ultimately sound like.
Well, I can tell you that uh lead guitarist is Stevie Ray Vaughan, uh, who is for just about the—the greatest of the new blues guitarists around—around. I saw him working on a jazz concert in Europe, and he was like second on the bill or something, and he—this little kid from Austin, Texas—came out and just played some of the most devastating city rhythm and blues I've—I've heard in years. He's great.
Who else is on the record?
Um, Carmine Rojas, who at the moment works, I think, very much with Nona, um, and uh Robbie Sabino on keyboard, who works with Nona, um, and uh a horn lineup of New York guys—of New York guys—New York guys.
It's been a while. You—you mentioned this, I think, before we—tape it. It's been a while since you put out a record.
Yeah, two years. Why now? Have you decided to—to come back to rock and roll?
Well, frankly, one of the biggest reasons is that uh I feel that I've got the kind of encouragement—I've just uh signed with a new label, EMI America, and it's given me the kind—kind of encouragement and freedom that I've not had, for one reason or another, in a very long time, and uh it's—it's great to have this—that kind of support and enthusiasm for what one does. That's really great. Plus, of course, this new optimism that you're talking about is another reason.
Yeah. I—I wondered—the last record was—had at least certain aspects that were very retrospective. This one moves forward for us. Does—does—help be—I think—okay, eclectically it's a—it's a pretty much a mixed bag. Um, there's no—no doubt that it still has a very strong European influence, but that's naturally going to come about through the way I work. Um, but it's fundamentally trying to regain the same kind of immediacy and excitement that uh one feels with one's old record collection. You always go back and say, "Those were the good old days." Well, I'm sure there's a way of saying, "Those were the good old days," and this is how you recapture that feeling and put it out um outside of one's—and not just have it lying dormant in there as though this is something that can never happen again. That's a great shame, then, and I'd like to try and tap that energy source again.
That's really exciting.
I hope—I hope you can do that.
Well, you know, we'll have a go. Whatever happened to the Bowie personas that we used to see with each record—finished in '76, I guess. All that—you—you know that—why though? What—what happened to them?
Um, they just—it was a—confuser—cat. I just—I just uh—I—I—I was too confused. Lad stereotype mixed-up pop star.
What about a tour? Everyone is waiting.
Okay, you can come. Yeah, I'm starting mid-year sometime, and it'll be a world tour. I don't know which territory first, but obviously America's uh will be part of it, and I'll do Europe and uh the Far East as well. It'll be the first one for seven years—six years over here—seven years in Europe.
Mhm. So there—going to be uh—a lot of people lately have been picking Bombay and South Africa and here and there. They've been going to some wild places to do concerts. You have anything like that?
Uh, yeah, two or three places that—purely for my own um curiosity and selfish reasons—probably going to play, but rather not try really talk about them until they come off because they're sort of quite—more signals—more signals—
30 Dean, you'll [Laughter]—serve—I was going to ask you who you like in the game Sunday, but that's—I like the Redskins, but the Dolphins are going to win. I rather—I was flawed when the Jets dropped out. It crushed—crushed.
Um, one more question about the new record, and then I—I want to find uh out if—if David Bowie has a—a long-range sort of a plan in mind. A lot of video, I understand, for the new record.
Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Yeah, yeah. Um, can—well, I was going to—what I was going to ask is—one—what you have in mind—if there's anything specific—what's—what I'll now do is I'll go—I'll go away for a month and devise storyboards and then decide which cameramen and um lighting people I want to work with and pull the team together and uh—a co-director for the technical aspects of it.
Will David Mallet be involved again?
That—I—I don't know. I've—this—a selection of people that have expressed really strong interest in working with me.
One other thing that you mentioned during the conference was directing. You said yes, yeah.
To a greater or lesser extent, I hope to do something um possibly in the early part of '84, but it—it'll be on a small scale and video and uh of a short duration—20, 30 minutes. Okay, and they're giving me a signal for last question if you can.
A three-year plan. You have a record, you have so many projects that we—we didn't even get a chance to touch on that will be happening soon—some that we've heard that are further off in the distance. What kind of things would you like to see happen for you over the next three years?
Oh, uh, I stopped thinking around January '84 and on—on positive ventures. I mean, it's—I'd hate to close myself off to um the possibilities of what I might or might not do after, but—
All that does is tell us that you're going to release this record and go on tour. It's very hard to think past that, you know. I mean, there's such a lot of work involved to pull that whole thing together—the tour especially. I've got to start designing the—the staging for that and whatever, and it—it just takes up time. I haven't got any time to think about all this future stuff, you know. It's really difficult. I get the breakfast in the morning.
What about those punishing questions you were going to ask me?
Well, yeah. Do you have the time? We've got nothing but—
Thank you very—oh, they did me out of my big chance. You probably know what was going to come anyway. We have—I don't know—it's up to—it's up to you guys. I'd like to ask you something, you know.
All right. Um, it—it occurred to me, having watched MTV over the last few months, um that it's—it's—it's got—it's a solid enterprise with—and it's got a lot going for it. I'm just flawed by the fact that there's so many—so few black artists featured on it. Why is that?
I think that we're trying to move in that direction. We want to play artists that seem to be doing music that fits into what we want to play for MTV. There's—the company is thinking in terms of narrowcasting. That's evident. Um, it's evident in the fact that the only few black artists that one does see are on about 2:30 in the morning or to around 6. Very few are featured predominantly during the day.
No, that's a—I'll say that over the last couple of weeks these things have been changing, but it—it's—it's a slow process. I know it's—it's funny. I think people have different perceptions. When you wind up watching, let's say you watch an hour or two or even three a day, people somehow come away with different ideas about what we are doing. We don't have any kind of day parting for anything, let alone a black artist day parted out of what would be quote prime time. We don't have that because one sees a lot on the—on the—there's a—one black station on television that I keep picking up. I'm not sure which station it's on, but there's a—there seem to be a lot of black artists making very good videos that I'm surprised aren't used on MTV.
Well, of course, also we have to try and do what we think not only New York and Los Angeles will appreciate, but also uh—pypy—or Midwest—pick some town in the Midwest—that will be scared to death by Prince, which we're playing, or a string of other black faces and black music.
Interesting, isn't that interesting? You know, we have to uh—we have to play the music that we think an entire country is going to—and certainly we're a rock and roll station. Now, the question would be asked, "Well, should uh—since we're in New York—should PLJ play uh, you know, the O'Jays?" Well, you and I might say yeah, because we have grown up in an era when the O'Jays mean something to me, and so do the Spinners, even way after the O'Jays, but what does it mean to a 17-year-old? Well, if you talk on the phones to these guys like I did when I was in radio, it's—SC—well, I tell you what it means. I tell you what maybe the O'Jays or Marvin Gaye means to a black 17-year-old, and surely he's part of America as well.
No question. No question. And that's why you're seeing those things.
Do you not find that it's a frightening predicament to be in?
Yeah, but less so here than in radio. And is it not—well, I don't say—well, he—not me—as them—is it—is it not—is it not possible that it's—it's—it should be a conviction of the station and of other radio stations to be fair? It—it does seem to be um rampant through American media. Um, is it—should it not be a challenge to try and make the media far more integrated in those music—especially of anything in musical terms?
Mhm. Absolutely. I think it's happening because white music and white musicians are now starting to play more than ever—what uh—more than they have lately—let's say in the last 10 years—what what black artists have been into. And now hopefully the lines are going to start to—to blur. And when we play a band like ABC, see, yeah, well, there's—there's white and black kids who are enjoying it, and all of a sudden—well, it's—it's a little bit easier for a white kid to understand it. The fact is, quite frankly, I—I could even point you towards a letter in the new issue of *The Record*, yeah, that magazine, *The Record*, responding to an article by Dave Marsh that this—this kid just ranted about what he didn't want to see on MTV. Well, that's—certain terms—well, what I'm saying though is that there's—as you say—there's certainly a lot of black kids and white kids who may want to see black music. There's a ton of them who are—it's not like it was in '67 where you say, "Yep, I'm—I'm not into that," you know, but you are—you are now. It's—you're into that. I don't like you, and that's scary. And we can—we can't just turn around and go, "Well, look, this is the right way." We can only teach, I think, a little bit at a time.
Interesting. Okay. Thank you very much. Make sense. Valid point. I understand your point of view. Cter—believe me, it's—it's a tough—tough situation. I just thought—because it's going to be a—sooner or later—it's just interesting, and I wanted to know what—what the response would be. Then there—there's never been any kind of racist like, "We don't want to play black artists, period. We want to play rock." I just know they—from—also it's also where cable is—it's where the—where the C—none of the urban markets have been wired yet. It's all suburban markets, so we had a choice between an R&B station or a station we will—the a station—hopefully we'll have a—it's—it's foremost on my mind, of course, because of the guys especially I've been working with recently who are very hostile to—the media—in no small way. I mean, they really think that it's—it's a bad deal at the moment, and it hasn't been like this in years. But on the other hand, I feel—I feel positive about it because I see another swing happening. There is a new thing happening. I mean, I'm sure you can understand that if you make a left-hand turn and say, "Well, we've been playing rock and roll, but now we're going to play uh, you know, the Commodores, and we're going to play all these—these bands that black radio, let's say, is playing—" This somebody laid down the ground wars in the beginning. There's, you know, there should be no reason why it has to change. Should have been there. [Music]