Graham Reid | | 6 min read
Here's a man who can even make his enormous wealth - estimated around $US1.5 billion ($2.8 billion) give or take quite a few million - amusing and frivolous.
"I did see a photograph of a house I apparently own in Perth and I'd very much like to take possession of it," he jibes. "It looks like a Frank Lloyd Wright house, a huge white minimalist place. I also have a neo-Victorian folly in Ireland that I have photographs of. Unfortunately nobody gave me the key."
He laughs - and you do, too. As one does in the orbit of immense wealth.
Bowie has the gift of elevating artifice into art, can pass off his mediocre saxophone playing as "impressionistic" and is seductive and witty, calculating and coy.
Irritatingly likable, in fact, and gifted at the art of talking things up while never making you feel you are being talked down to.
There's an appealing, unashamed professionalism with which Bowie markets himself - or whatever current idea of himself he feels timely to market.
Oddly, at this time, there is no current idea, no artefact, to market. There are no new wallpaper designs or paintings, no album, no movie or theatre piece, no career move we could be remotely interested in.
The purpose of this sometimes perfunctory, sometimes interesting, interview with him in a New York recording studio is his scheduled appearance at Gisborne 2000 on a bill with Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and a reformed Split Enz.
So let's cut to the chase, acknowledge we've been burned by festivals and get an answer he's going to be held to: "Signed the piece of paper yet?"
"Oh, for sure, without any doubt at all I'm definitely there. And my band."
These days, however, Bowie is the showman who seldom performs shows. So what's he up to?
He's writing music for a PlayStation game - no, he doesn't play himself - but that's not finished. September, he thinks.
"It's an extraordinary, complex piece of work, and they wanted something unusual in the way of music. So they asked me.
"I approached it as though I was doing a movie, so we wrote a soundtrack for it. There's ambient music, fight scene music, music for the strip clubs and all that - and being a French-designed game, there are plenty of strip clubs. You have to get the game to get the music."
There are also no art exhibitions - yet. He's probably having his first American one-man show in New York later this year, there's something with guitar orchestrator Glenn Branca for a European art fair, something with painter Jeff Koons for Paris next year ...
There's a new album enititled Hours ... due for release in October. Although you'd have to honest and say the world is hardly holding its breath for it. He's just finished mixing but he underplays it as "yet another crop of shots."
But it's not a sequel to the Outside 1 album which appeared in 1995, the first of an intended trilogy with rock boffin Brian Eno and ending in 2000, if we were to believe the publicity back then.
"I can't even get started doing the next stuff on it. All together we have 25, maybe 26, hours of recorded music from that period. I keep moving on too fast.
"Nobody would take Outside when we first recorded it. It was held back for a year until we could find somebody to distribute it in America and by that time my enthusiasm was pretty thin on the ground.
"By the time it did come out I'd already started writing for Earthling [his 97 album]. My attention span is incredibly short."
He doesn't discount the trilogy being completed but ...
David Bowie, so busy and so little to currently show for it?
These days - with $US90 million trousered after his bond issue in February 97 and ahead of even Sir Paul McCartney as the richest rock star in Britain - Bowie is a man who amuses himself.
Last year around April Fool's Day he and author William Boyd perpetrated a hoax when they created the biography of an imaginary artist Nat Tate, and he also played a good-natured but largely uninformative cat-and-mouse with Susan Wood on a Holmes interview when talking up his Gisborne appearance.
But while Bowie may be famous, is he still a live drawcard?
Two years ago his Italian tour was woefully undersubscribed (at one venue only selling 5500 tickets in a stadium of 30,000 seats). His Outside shows were often poorly attended. His critically panned early 90s band Tin Machine, with which he had a three-album dalliance - described by Russell Baillie in these pages at the time as a "thrash metal band in suits and not much more" - played only small clubs.
Bowie has suffered diminishing audiences this past decade and, in a piece of adept lily-gilding, says touring is not now a priority for him.
"Veteran rock star" is his appellation today but ask around and, the promoter aside, many will tell you it might not be easy to sell 20,000 tickets internationally to a place no one has heard of in a country that barely rates a mention in the United States or even outside the sports pages of British newspapers.
Ironically, however, because Bowie doesn't tour much, his one-off at Gisborne could make the event more marketable.
Of interest too is just what he's going to play. He announced in January 1990 his Sound and Vision tour - for which fans were invited to submit suggestions for a set list - would be the last time he'd play his past hits.
So with all due respect, David, a New Year's Eve crowd is not going to respond warmly to "here's a track from my new album." Or is there a Y2K meltdown on such statements?
"I'll probably do a lot of Tin Machine things," he laughs, then polishes off his current joke about a duet with Kiri on the old Sonny and Cher hit I Got You Babe.
Uh-huh.
"Well, I'll probably go back on my word and sing some old songs, but that's my prerogative. If somebody's got to change horses midstream I'm the man for the job, although they probably won't be the expected older songs, that's something I can tell you.
"I wouldn't want to leave a crowd of that size totally without some really familiar stuff."
And yes, he and longtime guitarist Reeves Gabrels are working on a new song specifically for the occasion. A kind of rock Auld Lang Syne?
"I think you could assume it won't be."
But there'll be a chorus to sing along to?
"I don't know, I'll have to start writing choruses again. Now there's an old concept. Or perhaps I could provide an ambient piece. Sort of, 'hum along to this!'"
Whatever, Bowie insists he's going to be here just after midnight singing in the new millennium.
"But you must stress this is for real, we are definitely coming, and we're going to give them a helluva show."
Whatever he does, The Chameleon Formerly Known as David Bowie is now The Artist Without Portfolio. In yet another hairstyle.
But whoever he was and whatever he is now, he's still famously David Bowie. And who is that man?
Maybe 30 minutes into the next millennium we'll have a better idea.
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David Bowie (and Split Enz) withdrew from the Gisborne concert citing concerns the organisers did not "have the ability or financing to complete the necessary infrastructure, production, and marketing arrangements required for a safe and successful Festival."
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