With Moonage Daydream pushing my buttons it seemed only natural that this year I make some kind of engagement with the Dublin Bowie Festival. This takes place in January of each year, around the anniversaries of Bowie's birth and death. I've never bothered with it before so I can't say whether this year's programme was typical, but I can confirm that the line-up featured musical performances (by Bowie tribute acts and Bowie-linked musicians), a photographic exhibition, talks, and film screenings in the Light House cinema.
The film screenings included another showing of Moonage Daydream, which I skipped on the basis that i) it was only a week or two after my last viewing of it and ii) it was on very late. But I did go and see The Hunger, Tony Scott's film adaptation of Whitley Streiber's novel. Truth be told even if I was not on a Bowie kick I would have crawled out of the grave to see this, as it is a film I have long been fascinated by without ever actually seeing, ever since I read the book and found its evocation of immortal sadness intriguing. And the film is an interesting one to show as part of a Bowie festival, as he only really plays a supporting role. It is a prominent supporting role, but Bowie is very much playing third fiddle to Catherine Deneuve and Sarah Sarandon.
The basic plot is simple enough. Deneuve and Bowie are an immortal vampire couple, except something is going wrong with Bowie's character, who starts to rapidly age, his hundreds of years of undead life rapidly catching up with him. Deneuve's character is sad, but there's nothing really she can do about it. And hating being alone she starts lining up the Sarandon character as Bowie's replacement.
Plotwise I kept finding myself comparing it with the book, or my memories of it (it was thirty years ago, your honour), and at certain key points I found the film wanting in this department. But the look and feel of the film is incredible, with its dark lighting, shadows and close-ups making it like the bastard child of German expressionist cinema and film noir. There is some great fractured time stuff too, with edits jumping backwards and forwards between the vampires on the hunt and then laying into their victims. It also does a good job of communicating the idea that maybe the life of an immortal vampire isn't really all that, even if your centuries do not start suddenly catching up with you. I did find myself wondering if this might be the first screen depiction of a sad and sympathetic vampire. The film also seems to have largely established the idea that if vampires existed they would hang out in goth clubs (as featured in the memorable opening sequence with Bauhaus playing in a New York club while the two vampires stalk their victims), something that would eventually become something of a cliche.
It also features doves, which seem to have been a bit of a thing in films of the era. In The Hunger they hang around in a loft but seem to never deposit their droppings on the floor.
Plus the film features Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon getting it on. This may have been the elevator pitch.
Aside from the cinema I attended a couple of the festival's talks. One of these was billed as a listening party for the album Aladdin Sane. David Bowie has a lot of albums and Aladdin Sane is one of the ones I've never heard. For the listening party they had Hot Press journalist Pat Carty chairing a discussion with Gerry Leonard (guitarist on Bowie's last albums), Leah Kardos (an academic), and B. P. Fallon (famous Irish music biz character whose actual link to Bowie is not entirely clear to me but he did provide a certain "I was there man" vibe to proceedings). But billing this as a listening party was a think necessarily false advertising. With the likes of Tim Burgess and his Twitter listening parties participants could listen to the records while reading the tweets (and possibly posting their own), but you can't simultaneously listen to a record while also listening to some guys yap away about it. So for this event they started off by playing bits of the songs and then having a bit of yap, but as the yap started going on and on they gave up on the music as otherwise we would have been there all night. For me this made for an odd experience, listening to people talking about a record I had not heard, but it was interesting to hear the general view of the panelists regarding pianist Mike Garson, whose playing was deemed a bit plinky plonky. Actually it was B. P. who introduced the plinky plonky criticism (the phrase "plinky plonky vibe" may have been uttered) but there was no real pushback against him. Leonard, who had played with Garson on late Bowie records said something about how Garson was now a good friend of his but then admitted that the pianist definitely loved the plinky plonky.
More generally the tacit subtext to the Aladdin Sane discussion was that the album is not really that good. Maybe not bad as such but certainly not front rank Bowie. I was nevertheless sufficiently intrigued by the discussion to pick up a copy afterwards and yes indeed, it is inessential. Definitely some good tracks (notably the title track and the hit) and some rofflesome lines (the one about how time falls wanking to the floor) but a good few of the tracks feel like Bowie by numbers (save where he is trying to evoke the Rolling Stones). Maybe it is not too surprising he broke up the Spiders soon after it was released. But it's not actually that plinky plonky.
That said, I am wary of going all in on dissing Aladdin Sane for fear that at some point in the future the penny will drop and I will realise that actually it is amazing. This has happened before.
There were two interesting and almost in-passing references to money in the Aladdin Sane discussions. Leah Kardos mentioned that around the time the album came out Bowie began to experience financial problems. Ziggy Stardust had pushed him up a level but he was now finding that his outlays had gone up considerably (with a large entourage and touring machine to support plus a sudden need to take limousines everywhere as well as a mammoth coke habit) but his income had not increased proportionately. She suggested that the eventual decision to rake in the cash with Let's Dance and the Serious Moonlight tour was largely driven by a need to get himself out of this financial hole. The other money thing was a "probably shouldn't be saying this" comment from one of the participants that I think it would be inappropriate to reproduce.
The following day, a Sunday, I went out to Rathfarnham Castle to see an exhibition entitled Bowie: Icon, which was a collection of photographs of David Bowie by one Philippe Auliac. The pictures were worth seeing but I am not sure they were worth going to see, though I did like what I saw of Rathfarnham Castle itself and may well make a return visit sometime. On returning back into town I returned to Whelan's where Leah Kardos (academic, Wire writer, stylophonist) was treating us to an audiovisual exploration of themes in and influences on Bowie's last works, the albums The Next Day and Black Star and the musical Lazarus. This touched on a lot of stuff, but one thing I found interesting was the way Bowie kept referencing The Man Who Fell To Earth in his work. I was also intrigued by the stuff about a young Bowie appearing in a mime/dance troupe with the pub landlord from The Wicker Man (the actor, dancer and choreographer Lindsay Kemp), dressed as a similar kind of clown to the one he plays in the "Ashes to Ashes" video. The influences meanwhile pushed a lot of my buttons, with Kardos showing long clips from various Derek Potter dramas (reminding me that I have long been a Derek Potter fan without actually having ever watched any of his dramas all the way through). Some of this stuff was interesting to me in terms of what it said about Kardos herself, in terms of her age and background: she's from Australia and a good bit younger than me, and she seems to have come to Derek Potter through his being referenced by David Bowie rather than his being someone whose TV programme were always on when you were growing up.
I was also intrigued by Kardos's discussion of the Lazarus musical and the clips she showed from it. This had completely passed me by and I was barely aware of its existence. It is a jukebox musical (and so is suspect) but it seems to have not done a Mamma Mia and used the songs to piss on Bowie's legacy, instead having a plot based on recurring themes in his work, with Bowie himself being involved in its creation for all that popular Irish playwright Enda Walsh did the actual writing. Wikipedia lists it as being a straightforward adaptation of The Man Who Fell To Earth, but that was not really the impression I got from Kardos's presentation, though she did suggest that it certainly referenced that work (as does a lot of late Bowie material). It came across as being quite multi-layered and almost enigmatic, not something that just gives us a simple story that allows the cast to belt out the Bowie hits in a manner that might appeal to the casual Bowie fan. This may explain why it did not do that well.
I was also interested by the in-passing assertion that the second Tin Machine album is actually great; the Tin Machine reappraisal starts now!
I probably would have bought the big brainy book about late Bowie that Leah Kardos has written but she didn't have very many copies with her so that was that. I might look out for it.
And that was it for the 2023 Bowie Festival. Maybe next year I will go to some of the gigs.
images:
Moonage Daydream still (Irish Independent: "Moonage Daydream review: Bowie documentary as zany and brilliant as the man himself")
Catherine Deneuve & David Bowie (Roger Ebert: "The Hunger")
Susan Sarandon & Catherine Deneuve (Catherine Deneuve Source (Tumblr))
Aladdin Sane (Wikipedia: Aladdin Sane)
Blackstar Theory (Bloomsbury: Blackstar Theory: the Last Works of David Bowie)
Tin Machine II (Wikipedia: Tin Machine II)
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